Theatre and Dance Reviews

It seems that the regular theatregoer spends an awful lot of time watching plays and shows about the theatre. Recently I've seen "The Producers" and "42nd Street" for example. ''Romantic Comedy" is therefore a romantic comedy set around the lives of two writers of romantic comedies.

For Tom Conti, who also directs, this is a reprise of a play he performed some years ago with Pauline Collins. The real joy in this production though is that the rest of the cast are mostly inexperienced and they are given the opportunity to appear alongside, and learn from, one of our finest actors. As you will read elsewhere on this Website, young Australian actress Kate Atkinson is superb in the role of writing partner Phoebe Craddock.

Tom Conti and Kate Atkinson

Craddock walks into the life of Conti's Jason Carmichael on the morning of his wedding day. Atkinson plays the geeky schoolteacher really convincingly and she is able to carry the transformation into a beautiful woman later in the play yet retaining the idiosyncracies of her earlier character. Indeed this is character acting at its finest and I suspect under Conti's tutelage we have not seen the last of Miss Atkinson.

Effortless

Tom Conti performs this effortlessly. When his character laughs, you feel he has almost "corpsed" so genuine is the laughter.

The play is set in New York and I always have a trepidation when starting to watch a play that involves accents. No fears here though. The accents throughout the small cast are understated, consistent and do not grate at all. I did have a little difficulty hearing some of the opening scene from row H of the stalls, but this was an opening night and the technical bods soon had the amplification of the stage set correctly.

Tom Conti and Kate Atkinson

Bernard Slade's script is slick and funny and it is delivered well by the cast. Eleanor David also impressed as streetwise agent Blanche Dailey. There are also some really clever visual gags throughout the play.

Engrossing

My main criticism of this play centres around the passage of time - 14 years in fact. There was no sense of changing fashion or the characters aging. Surely Blanche would not have worn the same enormous hooped earrings for all that time?

Overall though, this a thoroughly engrossing evening's entertainment. It's a privilege to watch a top class actor perform and to see him matched, if not upstaged, by a real emerging talent in Kate Atkinson.