Glorious is glorious (I promise that is the first and last I will make that joke) and if you haven’t seen it yet then you’re in luck because you still have almost two weeks in which to see it. Yes, I’m starting a review with the recommendation; it should tip you off as to how gushy the following will be, but don’t let me put you off. The Fortune is the stage of only a couple of good productions each year, and this show is one of the really, really good ones.

Richard Huber’s script was shortlisted for the Playmarket’s New Play Award in 2009, an accolade it fully deserves.  Sharp, witty, laugh-out-loud funny: the programme promises a “meeting place between sophistication and out & out slapstick”, and the play delivers. There are so many things I could praise the script for but what really stands out is Huber’s sense of repetition. A preternatural understanding of how many times an audience is willing to hear the same thing and beg for more. And it’s a two-edged weapon. On the one side, it’s a great comic effect. Even the most innocuous phrase is turned into a punch line, though you’ve really got to be there.

If you haven’t seen the play the title of this review won’t make you smile, and you will only look at the page in consternation when I tell you my mother told me not to leave out the bit with the father. She actually said that; “Damn it, Clare, don’t leave out the bit with the father.” On the other side, repetition creates moments of great poignancy.

Glorious is a screwball comedy, where “characters say and do outlandish things”, but it has a deep heart. “Revlon red and moist” is a phrase first met as the slightly repulsive purple prose of a not-yet-failed writer. By the end it is an expression of love, and the transformation works seamlessly allowing the audience to recognise how far the play has come from its beginning.

Such a brilliant script demands brilliant actors and they were found in Anya Tate-Manning (Gloria) and Daniel Coppersmith (Jimmy). One can feel nothing but respect for Tate-Manning who speaks nineteen-to-the-dozen seventy percent of the time, and yet never misses a beat and remains clear and understandable. Gloria is the quintessential spoilt little rich girl who got a pony for her sixteenth birthday and doesn’t understand what is wrong with the poor, but in Tate-Manning’s hands she is charming, fierce, and absolutely loveable. Coppersmith played off her beautifully, and the chemistry between them, upon which the success of the play wholly hinges, felt really real.

It might have been easy to let the words take over the production, but Patrick Davies found a good balance between verbal and physical. Swapping as easily the script between sophistication and slapstick, this play has both the best punch to the face I’ve ever seen and, with the help of Martyn Robert’s lighting, stage images with a moody beauty evocative of film noir. One of my favourite moments was Jimmy leaning against a wall staring at his shoes, washed from the side in blue light, his face half in shadows, like a black and white movie projected on to the stage only real.

The smaller studio theatre was perfect for the intimacy of the play, and still Davies managed to fit two totally distinct and separate locations, without any change in set, into the tiny space. A feat in itself, but it was managed so simply and elegantly, I didn’t notice it was happening until Gloria slipped straight from one to the other as she read the chapter of Jimmy’s novel with their first meeting.

Though at times filmic, the production still played on the strength of being theatrical. My biggest criticism of the play was that Gloria’s dresses didn’t fit her properly. They didn’t, they should have, and it annoyed me. That’s all.

Glorious is a truly wonderful play and unlike a lot of theatre reviewed in Critic you the reader still have the opportunity to go see it. Do. You won’t be disappointed.
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New Zealand theatre is big enough and mature enough to look after itself these days, so WOW! Productions – a company that helped nurse it through its adolescence – has decided to take us on a creative vacation to 1930s America. Not cultural cringe, but nostalgia, seems to have motivated Dunedin playwright Richard Huber to pen a screwball comedy, Glorious, and the result is pleasingly assured.

Glorious follows the basic pattern of the genre: two zany characters as a mismatched couple (she more zany than he) spar their way into love, and talk in voices that sound like sped-up crooning.

Anya Tate-Manning, as socialite Gloria, and Daniel Coppersmith, as writer Jimmy, have mastered the accent and peculiar cadence required; really seeming to delight in lines such as "I was thinkin’, I’m gonna get a job – what are they like?"

The full text of this review:

• appears in the NZ Listener (October 10-16 2009), on sale now.
• will be available online on 24/10/2009: Subscribe online to the NZ Listener.

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Gloria wears diamonds, a Revlon-red satin dress and an insincere Pepsodent smile. She always gets what she wants, sees herself as a Katherine Hepburn type, never shuts up and is given to pronouncements such as "I don’t understand the poor – they’re so needy."

Jimmy, the waiter, is really a struggling and socially conscious writer in the Dashiell Hammett mould. He lives on bourbon, coffee and belief in his own talent, because he has nothing else.

What can the two of them possibly have anything in common?

Glorious is the creation of Dunedin playwright Richard Huber, and it’s been brought to life in the Fortune Studio by WoW Productions and director Patrick Davies. Anya-Tate-Manning, who delighted Dunedin audiences earlier this year as Emma, takes on a very different role as Gloria with at least equal success, and Daniel Coppersmith is Bogart-cool as Jimmy.

The play takes film noir as its keynote and, while respecting the genre’s conventions, has tremendous fun with its clichés: this is the world of hard-boiled wisecracks, palpable atmospheres, sit-up-and-beg typewriters, suitcases in dim hallways, rain-soaked streets and martini-soaked regrets.

The script draws heavily on F. Scott Fitzgerald with echoes of Hemingway and Gone with the Wind, the relentless wordplay owes more than a little to A Prairie Home Companion‘s Guy Noir, and the lighting, operated by Martyn Roberts, contrasts bright spots with darkness in the manner of Edward Hopper paintings. 

Shortlisted this year for Playmarket’s New Play Award, Glorious is shamelessly derivative, very funny and sharper than any tack. It’s more than glorious – it’s brilliant. The season will run until 10 October.
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“I like the way you hold your drink, and the way you look at me with fascination and contempt.”  Fair enough reason for a beautiful American heiress to determine to marry an impoverished writer.  Well, in the wonderful world of Screwball Comedy at least.  Writer Richard Huber, who lends his considerable talents to a surprising variety of theatrical ventures, has conjured up this enchanting genre for our viewing pleasure, in WoW’s latest offering, Glorious.

Screwball Comedy seems to belong to Hollywood in the 1930s, but the tradition of the sparring couple, hiding their true feelings for each other with witty banter, neither wanting to be the first to confess, goes back much further.  Commedia dell’arte had independent Harlequin courting sharp-tongued Columbine, and of course Shakespeare brought his derivative genius to the party (though Huber’s heroine is less Beatrice of Much Ado, than Helena of All’s Well, in her determination to trap a reluctant male).  Then Restoration Theatre made much of what was cutely called ‘the gay couple’, whose daring verbal fencing was the core of the comedy.

Huber nails the style perfectly: crazily unconventional characters, in a titillating battle of the sexes, complicated by class conflict, and expressed in fast funny dialogue delivered at breakneck speed.  He takes two apparently antithetical characters who love to hate each other, and pops them into a confined space.  The situation is thus intriguing and unlikely, though I wouldn’t describe it as farcical.  Huber makes their rapid-fire repartee absurd but sophisticated, with sardonic humour masking true sentiment.

Screwball is actually named after a type of baseball pitch that is unexpected and confusing, and the zany plot takes some surprising twists.  To annoy her wealthy father, eccentric socialite Gloria announces she will marry Jimmy, struggling writer and part time waiter of German extraction, despite his reluctance.  She moves into his far from glamorous apartment, bearing a typewriter to replace the one she threw into a river, and installs herself on the sofa.  In a bit of class role reversal she even dons his late mother’s pink waitress uniform, to get a job and see how the other half lives.  We suspect Jimmy is not exactly indifferent to Gloria, and sure enough a sweet story of their mutual past is gradually revealed.

Anya Tate-Manning, who impressed earlier this year in Fortune’s delightful Emma, is totally alluring as Gloria, the spoiled, outrageous, but ultimately irresistible socialite.  Gloria likens herself frequently to Katherine Hepburn, queen of the Screwball Comedy, and Tate-Manning actually manages to resemble Hepburn.  Combining sharp delivery with a super-cool American drawl is no easy task, but she succeeds, and her movement is similarly both languorous and sexually aggressive.  Tate-Manning has a winsome ability to be bossy without being obnoxious, and her saucy confidence charms the audience.

As Screwball spotlights the feisty uppity woman, it’s hard for a man who isn’t Cary Grant to make an equal impact.  Daniel Coppersmith, however, is a good foil as the struggling writer obliged to earn the rent as a waiter.  Though passive by comparison with Gloria, he is not weak.  Tongue firmly in cheek, he delivers nice wry putdowns, but is capable himself of the richest of purple prose.  Never has a waitress been celebrated in more lavish and lyrical language.  Actually the pair take turns deflating each other – neither has the upper hand for long.  Sometimes literally: “Our destinies are entwined.”- “They wouldn’t be, if you’d let go of my hand.”

Patrick Davies has long been appreciated by Dunedin audiences as an actor, but fresh from gaining Toi Whakaari’s MTA, he takes charge as Director, and puts a splendid polish on Glorious.   It is by its nature a wordy play, but the lines are deliciously tossed off and the pace is cracking.  Davies knows just when to vary his luscious Noel Coward style with a touch of lively Abbott and Costello.  He has ensured some lovely physical comedy too, as when the couple sit on the same chair (as of course neither will give way), and when Gloria is unexpectedly biffed, or when Jimmy is literally grabbed by the balls.  The high point though, must be the teasing build-up to what may, or may not, be their first kiss.

Altogether the production values are excellent.  Martyn Roberts brings his special brand of magic to the moody lighting, and Danny Still creates ravishing background music, amusing without being intrusive.  Sharon Matthews’ costumes are shrewdly designed to make Tate-Manning look sensational, especially in her characteristic pose of backward curve with hand on hip.

Glorious runs at an hour and three quarters with no interval, and though the actors’ attack is bang on target, in the second half the unrelenting barrage of words causes them temporarily to flag a little, and the audience’s concentration falters.  Playmarket has workshopped Glorious, which was justifiably shortlisted for the New Play Award, and though pruning must have been hard with such an abundance of bon mots, perhaps a little further trimming would benefit the play.  (What was it the famous director said to the young playwright imploring him not to cut a favourite line?  “Indeed it is a good line, dear boy.  Use it in another play!”)

Nevertheless, it is a delight to relax in expert hands, and surrender to the pure enjoyment of this warmly affectionate backward glance at a delicious genre; to relish the sexy antagonism, elegant inventive dialogue, and gentle lunacy, confident that romance will win the day.  In our gloomy economic and ecologic times, recalling the ’30s Depression, Glorious is just what the country needs.  Thanks, WoW!
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