Reviewed by Malcolm Calder
I Want To Be Happy
By Carl Bland
A Nightsong Production
Directed by Ben Crowder & Carl Bland
Lighting – Sean Lynch
Set – Andrew Foster
Composer – John Gibson
Costumes – Elizabeth Whiting
With: Jennifer Ludlum, Joel Tobeck, Milo Cawthorne
Herald Theatre, Auckland, Until Sat 31 August
Then Circa, Wellington, 6-30 September
Reviewed by Malcolm Calder
Delightfully Delicious
This production is arguably one of the most delightfully delicious pieces of theatre I have seen this year.
I Want to be Happy is clever and becomes ever-more so as it unpacks. It is simple and yet it’s not. It is hugely comedic but it’s about other things. It is timely and requires sensitivity to a multitude of social issues. Above all, it is remarkably intelligent and requires an intelligent audience.
In short, and tucked away in the Herald Theatre, this piece of absurdism is likely to be something of a sleeper. A not to be missed one.
The cast is in a word – outstanding.
Binka is a guinea pig in a laboratory cage complete with attached sleeping kennel. But she is isolated and lives in a rodent world where only occasional smells, moments and memories have any meaning. She is completely isolated in the cage, has no contact with others and instinctively wants to escape.
Jennifer Ludlum’s first eyebrow twitch as guinea pig Binka captivates the audience and, for me, is one of the moments of Auckland’s theatrical year. Who would have thought it – a simple eyebrow twitch! Audience rapport grows from very quickly there as she takes Binka through various antics and anarchic adventures that become an emotional roller-coaster for the audience. Some pretty physical work at times too.
Monitoring, rewarding and feeding Binka via a feeding tube that dispenses food pellets and water, is Paul, a downbeat, chain-smoking lab assistant. He is lonely and isolated too and desperately wants to regain the love and the dearest friendship of his apparently wayward wife. But his efforts are failing miserably and Joel Tobeck endows him with the reality of this, imbuing the repetitive routines of his daily life with a shoulder-slumping tiredness that hints at depression.
Binka is the antithesis of Paul and the combination of Jennifer Ludlum and Joel Tobeck serves only to endow the production with a yummy depth. Their characters may have something in common but they cannot communicate. They occasionally talk at one but never actually exchange lines. Of course they can’t … one is a human and the other is – well, just a guinea pig. So the two characters mirror each other, albeit in different ways and in different contexts. Yet they share so much.
I Want To Be Happy explores this via the introduction of couple of other guinea pigs – a nice one and a not-so-nice-one of course, both played by a well-encased Milo Cawthorne, plus a few stray rats and even a particularly malicious cat. There are accidents, incidents and escapes all generating considerable mirth, yet touching a broad range of emotions.
I was particularly taken with Andrew Foster’s set which is divided into two parts. One is a mirror of the other, albeit on a different scale.
I Want To Be Happy is hardly conventional theatre. It achieves this with two outstanding actors playing two very different roles – outstandingly – and asks a lot of bigger questions and demands the audience ask them too.
Under no circumstances miss this production. Congratulations Nightsong, you have made my winter.
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