Black Comedy on a Bright Stage

How about a little farce from the guy who wrote Amadeus and Equus? British playwright Peter Shaffer's third best known play is the one-act Black Comedy – and is the upcoming offering by ACS's BG Drama troupe.

The play is a hilarious tumbling-over-one-another's-feet of stuck-up Brits, antique furniture, and social mores. With a brilliant theatrical trick: when the lights are out for the characters the stage is brightly lit, and vice versa.

Shaffer was impressed by the staged night fights in performances of Peking Opera. The fight choreography was played in full light with the audience imagining the darkness.

So when in the spring of 1965, National Theatre dramaturge Kenneth Tynan commissioned Shaffer to write a one-act play, the playwright described his idea of a party given in a London flat, "played in Chinese darkness," i.e. full light, because of a power failure in the building.

"We would watch the guests behave in a situation of increasing chaos," Shaffer wrote in the introduction to his Collected Plays, "but they would of course remain throughout quite unable to see one another. Ever one to appreciate a theatrical idea, Tynan dragged me off instantly to see Laurence Olivier, the director of the National. In vain did I protest that there really was no play, merely a convention, and that anyway I had to travel immediately to New York to write a film script. Olivier simply looked through me with his own Chinese and unseeing eyes, said "It's all going to be thrilling!" and left the room."

BG Drama's production is coming to you on March 12 in the Tear and Smile Theatre.

Rehearsals are in full swing: