"a sheer joy — one of the funniest..."

Nov. 22, 2003 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Lettice and Lovage, Peter Schaffer’s comedy, that spills over into delightful and extravagant farce, is the most flamboyant and life-affirming play of Shakespeare and Co’s successful 2003 season. And no setting for it could be finer employed than the theatre at Spring Lawn with its magnificent circling staircase just begging for material to compete with its grandeur and over the top romance.

Starring the versatile Tina Packer, that renaissance woman whose dynamic life as founder, director, fund-raiser, and administrator of the company has kept her too busy to perform for too many years, the play is a sheer joy— one of the funniest plays I have ever reviewed.

Packer’s acting skills are phenomenal and this farce-comedy (that for all its hysterical high-jinks and shenanigans includes serious themes) calls for all of them. As her character remarks during the play, “Fantasy moves in when fact leaves a vacuum.”

And fantasy is abundantly present. Lettice Douffet, the play’s heroine, has been raised by a mother who dragged her along with her all-girl cast that toured Shakespeare in French. Lettice has learned extravagance from the cradle and knows that the grayness of life in London can be redeemed only by bringing back the color that departed with the be-heading of Charles I.

But now her mother is dead, she is middle-aged at best and reduced to tour guide in Fustian House, the dullest of dull historical houses in England. Her exuberant spirit cannot be confined to the dullness of the house she must show and the lives that failed to be excitingly lived in it. She believes, as did her mother, that the only hope is to “enlarge, enlighten and enliven”. If fact creates a vacuum, fiction must fill it.

She thus so embellishes her tour lecture with fantasy and high drama that prim, repressed and life-negating Lotte Schoen (Dianne Prusha), her employer and director of the Preservation Trust, fires her. Schoen, grim, hard-faced, and unyielding has been defeated by the challenges of life in contemporary London. Daughter of a brilliant, but now dead, father, she has failed to be the architect she once dreamed of being and has ended up behind a desk, afraid of her world but marching glumly through it.

Before the play’s end her depressed, stern character will have been pulled into the wild world of belief and hope (and near hysteria) of Lettice’s world, and the two of them, each gaining from the association, will be joining in an admirable (many of the audience would agree) business that involves London tours of the ten ugliest architectural monstrosities of steel and unopenable windows that now grace London—the mere contemplation of which could induce mass suicides.

The ending does not come easily. There must be the gradual luring of Lotte into Lettice’s free-ranging love of life and romance, the slight tempering of Lettice’s extravagances, with disasters or near disasters along the way.

However, for all its hysterical farce, the play has a great deal to say about our flat modern world and the flat gray lives too many have accepted. Lettice shows Lotte (and us) that a great deal can be lost in lives that accept the word “mere.”

The acting of the two women is a joy. Packer, brilliantly and flamboyantly on stage in every scene, gives a tour de force performance. Her versatility is amazing. In the intimate confines of the small theatre, one can see every facial change, catch every nuance of voice that ranges from hysteria to momentary docility or incredulity. To observe her acting skill is a lesson in acting.

Prusha, long hailed as an expert actress, has broadened her range in this play moving from bitter, stern-faced acidity to a defiant defense of attacking the grayness of life and participating in its romance. She meets the farce-comedy of the role with joyous skills.

Directed and staged by the intuitive Eleanor Holdridge, beautifully and extravagantly costumed by Govane Lohbauer, with sets by Bob and Govane Lohbauer that mange to pack a great deal into the limited playing space, this play has employed all the best talent of Shakespeare and Co.

The two principal actors are sturdily and hysterically supported by Catherine Taylor-Williams and Andrew Borthwick-Leslie, whose roles may be smaller but not lesser, and who each show a delightful willingness to reject gray clad suits and march to a different drummer.

A fifth cast member, Isis, Packer’s own cat, drew a cast listing as Felina, Queen of Sorrow. It is a pleasure to be able to say that she performed impeccably and even managed her two lines of "meow" with feeling. Regretfully, she was not on stage for the curtain call.

This play is early Schaffer and the third act opening seemed a bit slow (fault of playwright and not the actors). Other than that, the evening is flawless, and even that brief lapse is soon swept into the even greater farce of an evening in which one has had the feeling there is nowhere more outrageous that this play can go. And then, surprisingly, the play and the actors prove us wrong as this bounteous play swings full circle and ends as it began with the indominaible Lettice once again on the tour circuit.

Nothing is “mere” in this play. And as Lettice, in one of her wonderful statements on her view of life and way of facing it, reminds us, “Without danger there is no theatre.”

Theatre is abundantly present at Spring Lawn. Enter the "Slipstream of fiction" that Lettice advises. You will not regret it. Enjoy! This reviewer did.