Theatre. 2 Out of 3 Ain't Bad

Flying Blind

Downstage Theatre Author Bill Morrison Director John Banas

There are a number of criteria that can be applied to criticising and understanding a play, or piece of dramatic art. But fundamentally all criticism is subjective. This is something they tend to forget to tell you about when you are studying English courses, but your opinion is as good as any other, and just because a critic can throw around fancy names and make him/herself sound superior by referring to plays/authors/films/ directors etc that you have never heard of, does not mean that he/she has the answer.

Criticism and drama tend to be a bit of a closed shop. Those in the know or those who want to be in the know may read them. People who have come to trust the opinion of the critic may be guided by those opinions. But drama criticism is a form of feed-back that, however unwelcome, theatre, and theatre in New Zealand badly needs.

It pisses me off something awful when I go to a play, find that it is lousy, discover that the houses have only just been full enough to keep that play being performed, and that the drama critics cannot say "It was bloody awful for this reason or this" but write sort of dear daphne reviews, which damn with faint praise and are always ever so nice to the director/writer/cast etc. How are actors ever going to know the truth in that situation?

To sum up Flying Blind according to these criterion, briefly, it is most entertaining, and entertaining because of good acting not laughable through poor performances. But, alas, it cannot be said that it comes anywhere near to achieving its ends

The plot is simple, set in a university suburb of Northern Ireland we follow the trials and tribulations of Ralph Poops, who really only wants to listen to Charlie "Bird" Parker on the stereo and live his dream of playing the horn. But interruptions come thick and fast in the form of; first an unwelcome guest, some men sent to to repair the central heating, a threatened politician, some protestant terrorists and finally, you guessed it, the IRA.

In style Flying Blind is a drawing room farce, with all the elements of farce that you could ever hope for. For a start the drawing room has four doors (doors always Figure largely in domestic comedies), there are various sexual goings on, with other people's wives and husbands and even a baby-sitter. There it the typical nutty hero of all farces distracted by reality, humane, hopeless, a Woody Allen of Northern Ireland. The comedy work is done well, the timing, the night I saw it, was excellent, a minimum number of cliches were used and the repartee was bawdy and clever.

The acting in most parts was also very good. Irish accents are not easy to come by, but most were sustained well. The bloke playing the lead male role, Bruce Phillips was excellent, and the supporting actors did support. The only two performances which marred the play (and here you get into the critic's dilemma - perhaps they were ill, maybe they had a quarrel with their landlady etc - yet they are paid, whatever the pittance, to perform well every night!) were those of Lloyd Scott and Wickham Pack.

Scott picked up towards the second half of the show, but in the beginning he made me embarrassed. Pack lost the Irish accent in the first ten minutes, slid over into American and finally ended up with upper crust New Zealand. She did not have the feel for the thing. For a start she leapt around the place like a frightened gazelle, very pretty, but not what was called for, and for another, the distance between her being coy and charming to her being deep and distressed was just too great to bridge even with an overactive imagination.

Now for number three - not the be all and end all by any means, but the one that is perhaps the most subjective, and to me the most important. In the programme for the play are the self-conscious politics that seem mandatory in political drama productions - they are never left to stand on their own. But these do not seem to have very much to do with the action of the play.

The programme rightly points but that the state of Northern Ireland has one of the most barbarous, fascist laws in the world, one that Vorster said he would be willing to trade all the injustice of South Africa for. Yet the general attitude to the struggle for self-determination in Northern Ireland is treated in a poisonous and patronising way. We are shown the effects of the troubles on one middle-class family - the men get impotent, the women get lovers that are also impotent.

We are shown violence, catholic [unclear: violenc] the protestants either can't touch a gun because they are too good, or can't get it [unclear: t] operate properly, but we aren't shown what causes the violence. There some stirring speeches, mostly put clumsily into the basic comedy framework of the play, It they deal with matters from one angle [unclear: alo] the distress of the middle classes when the world they know crumbles because they have profitted too long from a system [unclear: thai] brutalises the majority of the people. "Man's inhumanity to man" they mutter, lounging around on chairs that would cost most catholic families a year's savings. Yet dressed up in the frilly pants of farce it almost seems sincere, responsible drama, clothing an unhappy pill with riotious comedy. When what it is really doing is clothing lies with laughs.

I might go again, even if only to see [unclear: hoi] the actors cope with a malevolent set, that falls apart as they move around it, but if you are looking for political drama, leave it alone, your politics will die laughing.

Lisa Sacksen