Two Coarse Plays and a Two-Course Meal 2007
Our May 2007 production, Two Coarse Plays and a Two-Course Meal, was otherwise known as Il Fornicazione and Present Slaughter. The play on words resulted in the audience receiving dinner between the two short coarse plays – a novel way to make sure our audience didn’t go hungry during the performances!
Putting on Il Fornicazione by Michael Green was no mean feat – not least of all because it was a spoof of an opera, where “unfortunately” the conductor and orchestra (apart from the triangle player) were unable to get to the performance. The players had to sing all the words in an operatic style, with no accompaniment. The story, in typical operatic style, concerned a Countess, who had taken a young lover, who turned out to be her husband’s lost son – but this was not found out until the husband had poisoned them!
Present Slaughter by Jane Dewey was a spoof of a typical Noel Coward play, where two ex-lovers met unexpectedly at a hotel in the South of France. The “disaster” began when one of the lovers stabbed himself on stage, with the resulting “blood” spurting everywhere, much to the distress of the actress who played Mimi the French maid, who fainted on the stage, and to the main players who “forgot” where they were in the play and constantly repeated the same lines!
The audience thoroughly enjoyed the performances, especially after they realised that not everything was as it seemed. And, for the cast it proved a real challenge to perform a coarse play, where everything was meant to go wrong, but in the right way!