comedy

Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer
and The Marriage Proposal by Anton Chekhov
Directed by Dean Paul Gibson
Arts Club Theatre Company
Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage
Sept 10 to Oct  11, 2009

Vancouver, BC:  The Arts Club opened its 46th season with a riotously funny evening of  two plays by writers who would not at first come to my mind as writers of comedy. Peter Shaffer after all, is probably best known for Equus - a  intensely disturbing  psychological drama.   And I have never really found the Chekhov plays that I have seen or read to be exactly a bundle of laughs.

But as the curtain raiser to Shaffer's Black Comedy, Artistic Director Bill Millerd and Director Dean Paul Gibson chose Chekov's The Marriage Proposal.  And what an inspired choice.

Brilliantly performed by Sasa Brown as Natalia Stepanova, Simon Bradbury as Stepan Stepanovitch Chubkov and Jeff Meadows as Ivan Vassilevitch Lomov, it was clever and very funny.

Ivan, a lanky hypochondriac with palpitations and a dragging leg, comes to propose marriage to Stepan's 25 year old "on-the-shelf" daughter,  Natalia, but before he actually gets a chance to propose, they get into an argument about who owns a piece of land and he leaves inma huff. Natalia realizes that her "last chance for marriage" has just walked out the door and sends her father to get him back.

He returns but her argumentative nature gets the better of her and they get into another argument, this time drawing in her father. Both Bradbury and Meadows are hilarious but Sasa Brown's portrayal of a glowering, desperate, determined Natalia steals the show in this short farce.  I loved it.