" ... a joy not to be missed"

June 4, 2006 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

The ingenious and adaptable Shakespeare and Company has gracefully and successfully moved its former intimate-style plays from Springlawn to the vaster, thrust Founders stage where Enchanted April, Matthew Barber’s adaptation of the novel by Elizabeth von Armin, opened on June 3, and where it will run in repertory until early September.

The play’s small cast is studded with seasoned veterans of the company, each chiseling out a well-molded character, and the production, under the subtle and sensitive direction of Normi Noel, is a joy not to be missed.

Enchanted April is an escapist romantic comedy, but its finely honed characters make it something more—a joyful renewal and awakening, a shedding of a month of dull rain in gloomy London (1922) for a sun-filled month in an old castle in Italy, smothered in wisteria.

The plot is simple, the characters are complex. Lotty, (Diana Prusha) a lonely London housewife floundering in a disappointing marriage to a dull starchy husband (Malcolm Ingram) learns of a castle for rent for a month, advertises and convinces three other lonely women to share it with her for the month of April. Her search for the others and her convincing them to join her provide the material for the first act, comprising nine short scenes in various London locations.

These are minimally staged on the Founders thrust stage, suggested by a piece of furniture or two, although a church can be ingeniously suggested by two ladies making little jerky genuflexions to indicate an aisle.

The determined Lotty, who has never before cut loose in her drab life, succeeds in luring into the expedition another lost house-wife, Rose (Tod Randolph) whose marriage to a poet is floundering and who has been taking refuge in religion; a lithe and elegant Lady Caroline Bramble (Corinna May) mourning a young husband, lost in the recent war; and Mrs Graves (Elizabeth Ingram) who is firm, prim, grim, well-educated, well-read and intimidating.

The assortment of ladies makes for zesty moments of comedy concerning the English class system once they all arrive in Italy where the second act is played in buoyant release from the confines of Act I, and where the expansive possibilities of the Founders Theatre are an asset.

And where the prim costumes of the first act can give way to nightgowns of gauze and moon light in a garden. Where Rose is briefly a Madonna model for the appealing young artist Antony Wilding (Seth Powers) who owns the decaying castle.

Where Lotty can cut loose with wild abandon and feel so joyously sexual that she wires her strait-laced husband to come and share her bed. Where Rose’s dallying poet husband (Dave Denke) can appear and be brought back in line. Where Rachel Sigel as an Italian housemaid babbles hysterical Italian that the Londoners can only in part understand.

The contrast between the two halves of the play is deliberate and well paced. Act II is much more fun than Act I, but it is supposed to be. The flowering joy and renewal in transforming Italy turns up the tempo and the comedy, and, with the shedding of garments, the hilarity.

The play is expertly cast and all deserve plaudits. Diana Prusha is magnificent, both in her sad, gritty determination to escape her dull life and in her joyous acceptance of freedom. She can be zany and wild, but also, framing the play and giving the epilog, she is gently appealing.

Elizabeth Ingram’s timing is impeccable, a joy to observe keenly—the slight pause before she enters a room to dominate it, the determined way she wields her cane (until later in the play seems to not need to use one) and in the gradual shedding of her buttoned up garments.

Tod Hunter is radiant in Italy (having been meek and cowering in London) and almost falls in love with the artist who paints her.

Corinna May inhabits the rich, languid, but unhappy elegant Lady Caroline in elegant décor of the 20’s in a small but pivotal role; and Malcolm Ingram, unstarchy in Italy, provides the funniest nearly nude scene possible without being scandalous.

The costumes are elegant as usual, and the Founders has proved it can work for small cast intimate plays. For this one, it worked better for the second act than for the first, but even there the many scene changes were handled deftly.

The play is in repertory until September 2. Go and enjoy!

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