The Art of Coarse Acting. By Michael Green, Rupert Bean and Jane Dewey. Directed by Chris Baldock. Canberra Repertory Society. July 25 to August 10. canberrarep.org.au or 62571950.
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Picture this. You're an actor on stage with a gun, about to shoot someone. You're waiting for the sound effect to come from offstage, but it doesn't. And doesn't. What do you do?
In a production of The Real Inspector Hound, the actor simply said, "BANG!"
Or this: you're on stage by yourself in One Man, Two Guvnors waiting for another actor to come on so the scene can continue. But that other actor, backstage in his underwear, has missed his cue. Until he twigs and hurriedly and clumsily puts on his costume to come on, you're forced to improvise, filling in the silence as best you can.
These are genuine Canberra amateur theatre mishaps (names omitted to protect the guilty) and this is the sort of thing that is the meat of The Art of Coarse Acting.
It's a series of short plays inspired by Michael Green's book of the same name, first published in 1964 and revised several times before the author died last year. The Art of Coarse Acting, Or How to Wreck an Amateur Dramatic Society was first published in 1964 and was revised several times before Green died in 2018. It influenced such popular works as Noises Off and The Play That Goes Wrong.
A Coarse Actor, according to Green - who wrote from long experience - is an amateur who can remember his lines but not the order in which they come, among other distinctive - and disastrous - traits.
Green and others also wrote short Coarse plays that deliberately showcase some of the things that can go wrong. Six of them are featured here - ranging from kitchen-sink and prisoner-of-war dramas to murder mysteries - and they're supposed to be done badly - but entertainingly so.
The conceit of the production is that the ensemble cast are members of the Poon River Dramatic Society with real-life relationships - including feuds and infatuations - that are almost as detrimental to the plays as their propensity to stuff up things on stage - props, entrances, dialogue, you name it.
Arran McKenna - the hapless onstage actor in the abovementioned One Man Two Guvnors - says the plays spoof different genres and are presented "with varying degrees of bad" by "an amazingly funny group of people".
He plays the Inspector in Streuth, a crime story that, he says, is "a piss-take of An Inspector Calls".
His offstage persona is as the owner of an establishment called Vincenzo's: as a condition of sponsoring the company's tour, he was allowed to act.
Marni Mount's Poon River character plays Cecily Chichester in the Jane Austenesque Pride at Southanger Park.
"She has a desperate crush on the actor playing opposite her," she says.
"But he bats for the other team. Does she know? I don't think she does."
And it's not just actors who can be Coarse.
Liz St Claire Long does not play an actor, but a stage manager, who is frequently seen onstage but imagines, "I don't think the audience will notice."
She says Baldock emphasised to the company that corpsing - out-of-character laughing onstage - was strictly forbidden: it goes against the genuine effort the Poon River actors are making.
"These people are very serious," she says.
"The more serious you are, the funnier it is."
All three actors agree that being deliberately bad on stage is a challenge. Mount says all the actors have had a set of instincts drilled into them they have to fight against for the plays to work as intended and adds, "The other thing is everything has to go wrong in exactly the right way at exactly the right time."
