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The Odd Couple

Added on 12/03/2008

Donnchadh O'Conaill enjoys some light-hearted comedy at Trevelyan College...

One-Liner Machine
Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple is a great play for student theatre and especially for college companies – no complicated set or tech, immediately enjoyable, with a lot of decent roles but nothing too demanding. Furthermore, the female version (rewritten by Simon in 1985 from the 1965 male original) is refreshing to see in Durham’s current theatrical scene, where most plays seem to have male-dominated casts, particularly in the lead roles. As a piece of drama, The Odd Couple is slight, but it’s really just a machine for churning out Simon’s one-liners, a bit like an updated Noel Coward play, and in this respect it’s a pleasure to sit through. This production wasn’t exactly polished or state-of-the-art, but it made for a pleasant night of theatre nonetheless.

odd couple poster Gabrielle Wass had good stage presence throughout as Olive, the sports fanatic and slob. Hers was probably the most rounded performance of the evening, nicely capturing Olive’s pugnacity without going over the top. One criticism I would have is that her vocal range seemed a bit narrow; when she got angry her voice became shrill very quickly, leaving little room for the kind of slow-burning rage that I feel would suit Olive best.

Shifting Tone
Alex Walshaw, the more uptight and borderline neurotic of the eponyms, had some memorable set-pieces, in particular her first entrance, when she walked zombie-like across the front of the stage. They had some excellent comic exchanges in the second half, but the few serious moments they were required to play were noticeably weaker. This was a feature of the production as a whole – while The Odd Couple is a light comedy, it does have some shifts in tone, which weren’t clearly defined.

The supporting cast tended to have good individual moments, but were weaker when functioning together as an ensemble. This is partly because it’s hard to perform Simon’s rapid-fire dialogue between more than a handful of actors, but the scenes with five or six women on stage also seemed a little under-rehearsed, with the cues often being just a little off, which is enough to take a lot of the sting out of this kind of dialogue. This never threatened to sink the production, but it did give it a slightly fragmented feel at times. For example, Kay Hetherington gave a lovely turn answering a phone call from her incompetent husband, and Vicki Sparks’ last comments before leaving were delivered with conviction, but these characterisations were lost somewhat in the ensemble scenes.

A Bit Of A Giggle
The scenes with the Spanish brothers work differently, partly because these characters are broader than anything else in the play and can survive being played for laughs outright, which is exactly how they were handled. Simon Mallace-Goulbourne had the polish and charm; Charlie Cussons the puppy-dog enthusiasm. You couldn’t really call the accent Cussons affected Spanish, but it didn’t really matter – everyone was having such fun on stage that you couldn’t complain, and the script is so strong here that it could afford to coast along on some awful groaners.

odd couple dialogue These scenes summed up the production: technically pretty creaky in places, but delivering an enjoyable evening’s entertainment, partly because of the script and partly because the cast were clearly enjoying the experience of playing it. The set was a typical college theatre cardboard-and-Sellotape job, which suited proceedings admirably. Less suitable was the music between scenes, eighties rock played out of what seemed to be speakers made of tinfoil. Bono’s earnest whine on ‘With or without You’ was particularly incongruous, and the wonderful theme tune from the movie version was conspicuous by its absence. If you were looking for polished theatre, The Odd Couple would have been rather a disappointment; if you were looking for a bit of a giggle, then it did the job very well indeed.