By Mansi Tiwari
If you ever found yourself flicking through the BBC’s prime time entertainment in the nineties, it is highly unlikely you were able to avoid coming across the quaint life of one Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances. Guess what, she’s back and this time, she’s a Londoner with only one thing on her mind and it certainly isn’t flower arrangements.
Judy (Deborah Somers) and Fred (Stephen Thomas), an uncanny harking back to Hyacinth Bucket and her deeply sexually-frustrated husband, find themselves in a double booked villa in Provence with Maurice (Tomi Gustav Järvinen) and Yvette (Insaf Mteraf) from Paris. Cultural stereotypes are thrown around, curses spoken in foreign tongues, laughs are claimed from low-hanging comedic moments, until they are joined by Shaun (Pepper Lebeck-Jobe) and Moira (Bouqui Stautmeister), textbook Americans who, too, jump into the fray.
A Night in Provence by Robert Hawdon hails the return of the comedy of manners to the stages of Zurich, chockful of accents thick as freshly churned butter and brought to the 21st century – although the play was first performed in 2007, it would not have been surprising to come across it as a glimpse into an earlier age. The Zurich Comedy Club’s most recent play, directed by Claudia Wicki, manages to capture the supposed trials and tribulations married couples of the more mature variety face – the odd tryst on vacation, the perpetually unpleasing and unpleasable wife, and, at the heart of this knotty affair – bonking, rogering, or whatever verb your mind offers up for good old-fashioned sexual relations.
Stephen Thomas’s Fred was delightful in his dedicated physical performance of the type of man Yvette called “British roast beef”. The bottled-up Brit trying to prove himself a romantic to the French Yvette, elicited peals of laughter in his dad-est of mannerism. In fact, all actors performed their oftentimes woefully stereotyped characters to the fullest and played their roles for the chuckles they were written for. The staccato interjections of Maurice and Yvette bore great comedic timing, although they were often forced to make way for the English-speaking couples. The stage design was a lush tableau that brought the French Riviera into this windy month of May, complete with tiled floors, doorways and a kitchen that wonderfully created the illusion of a vacation on stage. The lights only added to stage’s magic, with wonderful set-ups recreating night time and the early rays of dawn on stage and truly sparkled in the marvellously accurate costumes of the three couples.
A Night in Provence is a play of simple pleasures and does not claim to be anything else, but a nudge and a wink in theatrical form. Perhaps this is why some of the lines are stretched rather taut in trying to milk the chauvinistic Frenchman for laughs, but they certainly snap when faced with the task of resolving the problem of extra-marital affairs, distrust, and betrayal within the play.
One reviewer mentions how the play had him reduced to helpless laughter, and often, it was helpless indeed in trying to come to terms with lines that had you squirming in your seat with pricklings of discomfort. Overall, if you’re looking for some gentle laughs and jokes on the frustrations of marriage, sex, and love, do visit the Zurich Comedy Club’s latest show and let yourself take a trip to Provence.
Please visit Zurich Comedy Club for more information on the play and ticket reservations.
ENGLISH THEATRE IN ZURICH 