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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 30, No. 1. 1967.

Few jokes survived playwright

Few jokes survived playwright

Downstage's latest production an-nounces itself as a black comedy. Black comedy jests with the unmentionable and the unspeakable. II it is any good It surprises our expectations and mocks at our norms.

Unpleasantness alone does not qualify it for our extended consideration: and in Entertaining Mr. Sloane even the unpleasantness was undistinguished. Certainly the entertainment was marginal.

It did, I suppose, contain an idea for a farce. The leading character had a choice between the attentions of the middle-aged brother and those of his decaying sister; either party, if affronted, could convict him of murder. The plot was otherwise uninteresting and the surrounding witticisms flat. The play was unsatisfying in design and detail. One good dilemma is not enough in a performance of otherwise dreary insignificance.

On occasions like these, one likes to sympathise with the deserving cast. Sympathise one can. but more with shortcomings than for unmerited hardships. Shirley Duthie, Ronald Lynn, Stephen O'Rourke and Leslie Wright pursued slickness relentlessly: they fell on their cues with rapacity and kept the pace to a gallop.

Their efforts were quite exhausting: and they abolished, in their haste, the few jokes that had survived the playwright.