So wrong it’s right

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This article was published 18/10/2024 (533 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before the Cornley Drama Society’s cast takes the stage for the opening night of its amateurish run of The Murder at Haversham Manor, the professional stage crew at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre goes into crunch-time with the curtain up — a warmup act that pays dividends by making the audience pay attention to every hanging portrait, every loose screw, every doorknob and every obscenely elevated chandelier.

Props that don’t belong — a letter F wrapped in a feather boa, a dairy cow and a series of increasingly large hatchets — are rolled out. A stagehand (Emily Meadows) trips and spills a garbage bin, and an audience member is ushered from her seat to help sweep up the mess. A caged parrot is lowered from the upper tier to a Cornley player waiting with outstretched arms below.

The stage manager (Honey Pham) deals with a pesky mantel. A crew member (Ray Strachan) is in no way hidden, despite his camouflage shorts. In the wings, a Cornley Player (Vanessa Leticia Jetté) gives another (Alexander Ariate) a backrub, walking under featherlight ladders in shrewd defiance of prevailing superstition.

What follows is a production so riddled with mistakes that it’s difficult to imagine RMTC ever partnering with the drama society again.

Nothing was secure, nothing in need of repair was fixed, and yet still, nothing should be changed. In a world where comedy is often disregarded as an inferior artform, The Murder at Haversham Manor, housed within the purposefully faulty framework of The Play That Goes Wrong, is a two-act exposition that reveals every nook and cranny — the study, the foyer, the elevator, the script and the booth — as a room for error. It’s a marvel of co-ordination, physicality and commitment to the bits, where every doorway is a setup to a thousand punchlines-in-waiting and every telephone call requires gymnastic creativity.

Directed by Dennis Garnhum, with a perfectly dysfunctional manor designed by Beyata Hackborn, who also designed the well-deployed and often misplaced props, The Play That Goes Wrong is marked by its willingness to invest into all modes of humour.

There are jokes for every kind of laughter: the giggler, the chuckler, the snorter and the begrudging groaner.

Every pronunciation and movement is ammunition for shortfalls in this meta-theatrical production filled with smoking jackets and smoking guns, where some Cornley Players forget their lines but the actors playing them always remember when they’re supposed to forget.

While Hackborn’s topsy-turvy set, Joseph Abetria’s Ealing Studios-inspired costuming and Kimberly Purtell’s explosive lighting define the boundaries of the fictional world, the cast brought in for this production — the third and final leg of a co-production with the Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary — is excellent: a few people died throughout the evening, but everyone killed.

The story of Murder opens with the Cornley director (Daniela Vlaskalic) apologizing in advance for the misfortune to come. At Haversham Manor, an engaged heir (Ariate) is found dead, leaving his fiancée (Jetté), her brother (Joel Schaefer), his butler (John Ullyatt) and his best friend (Andrew MacDonald Smith, a gangly delight) in disbelief and disarray.

They continue to drink their scotch even after they recognize it for butane.

An estimate of one laugh per minute would be too low as the show goes progressively further off the rails. It’s not gratuitous though: the humour is inspired by a prevailing tendency toward silliness and make-believe.

In the second act, as the cast is knocked off and knocked out, the roles switch, the set’s tectonics shift and the mistakes compound with little regard for prevailing human logic.

As is often the case with farce, some audience members are finished with jokes after the first, second or third callback. But part of the joy of The Play That Goes Wrong comes in the tension and unpredictability of repetition. There are no rules observed when Ullyatt’s Perkins forgets his next line, trapping his castmates in a futile cycle of narrative stalling; Ullyatt seems to note the atmosphere, choosing, based on the flow of the audience’s laughter, when to remember.

A loving ode to amateurism, to opening night jitters and to the history of comedy itself, The Play That Goes Wrong is a reminder that there is little funnier or more endearing than giggling to ourselves as other people embody our own misfortune.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com