BLACK COMEDY

Orange Tree Theatre

★★★★

“farcically over the top – but that’s what it’s all about”

There is something intrinsically satisfying about watching somebody dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole. Witnessing others’ misfortunes – especially in a theatre environment – isn’t driven by cruelty. Psychologists and philosophers have written pages on the subject of ‘schadenfreude’, but most of us enjoy the sensation without giving it a second thought. Which is why television shows like ‘You’ve Been Framed’ are popular. Farce is funny. It works best by putting ordinary people into extreme, out-of-control predicaments; the humour coming from watching them try to maintain their dignity and hide their secrets, while all around everything is falling apart.

Playwright Peter Shaffer certainly knew how to tap into this concept when he created the characters for his 1965 one-act comedy “Black Comedy”. And then he added another trick, borrowed from Chinese theatre, where he would reverse darkness and light. The play, set in a young sculptor’s South Kensington flat, opens in pitch black. When a fuse blows plunging the flat into darkness, the stage is illuminated. We see everything, while the characters are stumbling around in the dark. What ensues is seventy-five minutes of joy, watching the disintegration of order coupled with seeing how the darkness reveals truths that the characters manage to hide in the light.

A simple but ingenious conceit made trickier by playing it completely in the round: the expertise required by the cast is magnified, yet they pull it off superbly. Fledgling sculptor Brindsley (Joe Bannister) and his fiancé Carol (Leah Haile) are preparing to meet a rich and influential art dealer. Anxious to impress, Brindsley has ‘borrowed’ some expensive antiques from his neighbour Harold (Simon Manyonda) without his knowledge. Meanwhile, Brindsley’s former mistress, Clea (Patricia Allison), is threatening a comeback, while Carol’s father – Colonel Melkett (Jason Barnett) – has arrived to check out his prospective son-in-law. Teetotal neighbour Miss Furnival (Julia Hills) enters, seeking refuge from her fear of the dark.

Caroline Steinbeis, making her directorial debut at the Orange Tree Theatre, handles the intricacies and the chorographical demands with panache. Aided by physical comedy consultant, John Nicholson, the fast-paced chaos unfolding on stage feels natural despite the precise and intricate blocking required. Occasionally things fall out of synch, but we barely notice amongst the intentional mayhem. Bannister has faultless comic timing, pitching pauses perfectly during which we can almost hear his brain working out how to get out of the next mess he’s found himself in. Haile’s Carol is teasing and playful, a willing accomplice to her fiancé’s deceptions, simultaneously rebelling against her military father while wrapping him around her finger. Barnett gives a gentle giant of a performance as the colonel; imposing but bumbling, regimental in his speech but betraying a taste for subversion.

The laughs increase in tandem with the number of people onstage. When Harold returns early, much of the humour derives from Brindsley’s doomed attempts to replace all of his belongings before the lights come back on. Physical comedy comes to the fore, around which Manyonda – as Harold – dances with a camp joie de vivre, until it turns to gleeful horror when truths are revealed. Hills is a delight as Miss Furnival, accidentally discovering the joys of alcohol in the darkness. Allison is a gorgeously impish Clea, who delights in the advantageous observer’s position in which she finds herself. A mischievous smile follows her every movement and sentence – it is clear she is relishing the chaos. When Schuppanzigh the electrician (Chris Chilton) arrives, he is mistaken for the rich art dealer in a wonderfully slapstick, though slightly predictable, comedy of errors. The real art dealer has barely more than a walk on role, but Javier Marzan makes the most of it.

A whirlwind of a show, it works well up close. Dangerously up close for the performers, but they use the audience to great and comic effect. It is farcically over the top – but that’s what it’s all about. As a play, “Black Comedy” is as light as they come, and great fun. A reminder that, at times, theatre is simply pure, joyous entertainment without needing to be anything more.

BLACK COMEDY

Orange Tree Theatre

Reviewed on 27th May 2026

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Sam Taylor

BLACK COMEDY

★★★★

“this vibrant revival offers many laugh-out-loud moments”

Based on a real-life incident in the author’s Stephen Joseph Theatre company in Scarborough, the comedy is set over the course of one Saturday night/Sunday morning in three different bedrooms. Wisely the director (Robin Herford, a stalwart of The Mill and an active member of Ayckbourn’s Scarborough based company, for just over a decade, earlier in his career) and designer (Michael Holt) have firmly set the show in the mid-1970s. Some of the language used, attitudes and relationships portrayed are decidedly ‘of their time’, although have the ring of truth still.

Three married couples, linked together with a fourth, by family, friendship and past relationships, ready themselves for an evening of enjoyment. The show opens with Ernest (Stuart Fox), obsessed with the damp patch in the spare room, and Delia (Julia Hills) dressing for an anniversary meal at their favourite restaurant. They consider themselves ‘regulars as they go every year’. Delia wants to talk about their son Trevor (Ben Porter) and the ‘bedroom problems’ he is having with his wife, the ‘entirely unsuitable’, Susannah (Allie Croker). Both of whom are on the guest list for prankster newlyweds, Malcolm (Antony Eden) and Kate’s (Rhiannon Handy) housewarming party that night. As are Jan (Georgia Burnell), the ‘much more suitable’ former partner of Trevor and Nick (Damien Matthews), her now husband.

Amidst the laughter there is exploration of what it means to be a married couple, the potential for infidelity and what a wife might expect to have to do to make a marriage work or the sensitivity of a husband’s ego. There is also a nod to the mental health pressures and potential victimhood within a relationship more talked about and taken more seriously today, perhaps, than fifty years ago. The more pragmatic ‘shut-up and carry-on’ attitude of Delia contrasting with the lack of confidence and self-doubt of her daughter-in-law, who is portrayed well as a nervous, irritatingly bird-like creature, repeating her mantra of self-worth at every unobserved opportunity.

There is plenty of good physical comedy too. Largely around Nick’s incapacity due to a ‘wrecked back’ meaning he remains at home alone in bed whilst Jan attends the party. This is added to through Malcolm’s attempt to prove himself, pitted against a flat-pack ‘surprise’ for his and Kate’s bedroom. The ‘coats on the bed’ of the party leading to an encounter between the former lovers, on which the rest of the plot turns, having earlier provided several moments of fine comic timing from Kate, still not ready as the guests start to arrive, being buried by the dozens of coats of the unseen guests downstairs.

The linchpin of Trevor, played with appalling self-obsession, belief and lack of awareness, wrecks not only the party, by fighting with Susannah, but also the night of Nick and Jan by descending unannounced to entirely unnecessarily apologise for his earlier actions. With Suzannah seeking her mother-in-law’s help disturbing the night of the older couple and the increasingly frenetic DIY that of the newlyweds, there is not much sleep for anyone. With Graham Weymouth’s quick and subtle lighting changes helping to shift focus across the three contrasting bedrooms on stage, the farcical element of the play alluded to in the title is enhanced well.

Ayckbourn is perhaps best known for his popular plays focused heavily on marriage in the middle classes and this vibrant revival offers many laugh-out-loud moments alongside a reassuring peek at earlier, seemingly simpler times that hints at the complications lurking below all marriages. You should see this production if you are content to laugh at yourself or those you know.

Tag Archives: Julia Hills

BLACK COMEDY

★★★★

Orange Tree Theatre

BLACK COMEDY

Orange Tree Theatre

★★★★

“farcically over the top – but that’s what it’s all about”