Having a stag party on one floor of a hotel and the corresponding hen party on the floor below looks bound to provide scope for even more than the usual degrees of horrendous embarrassment. And so it proves, in this new farcical comedy, with increasing invasions of each others’ segregated turf.

Walking straight, up the aisle, the next day, after such a boozy night, looks improbable; but by half-time, doing so at all looks completely doomed. Still, this is a comedy, so things have to work out somehow. It’s cleverly and plausibly contrived.

With just five actors, three male and two female, having each of them double in male and female roles not only makes two rather small parties possible, but adds an extra level of humour. They do well, yet the effect is sometimes very funny. A few really fast costume-changes must be going on offstage.

This is a genuinely good play: it moves along well; it’s well-shaped; the dialogue rings true; and the characters and their relationships become adequately interesting and amusing. As a good-fun work, it’s well-suited to the pre-Christmas season.

Simon Ferry’s directing is clearly efficient, and builds a secure and varied pace. While this is comedy rather than full-on farce, timing and degrees of heightening of character and situation have to be well-judged, and they are.

The cast are all capable, with Simon Vincent and Curtis Vowell especially strong as the beleaguered groom Digby and his brother Eddie, and a hoot as the bride’s leggy friends Naomio and Lizzie. Jen Cowan manages a sympathetic role as the bride, and a character-role as Aaron, the out-of-place guest, trying to be the life-and-soul.

Darien Takle handles amusingly both the groom’s mum and the bride’s laconic dad. Reihama Haronga copes with groom’s friend and bride’s friend.

The staging is traverse-style, with the same relatively minimal setting, variously dressed, for the two rooms of the hotel, and a few digs at cultural pretentiousness.

The show can be warmly recommended.

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The play begins in the Woollaston Room. Well, it doesn’t actually, it began in the McCahon Room downstairs about five minutes earlier, but we don’t discover this until the second half. In other words the play started five minutes before it started, with the attendees of a stag party turning up on the wrong hotel floor.

And that’s the thing that puts this play a whole cut ahead of its genre; it not only presents itself as farce, it examines the machinery of farce as it goes. Writer Ross Gumbley has followed Tom Stoppard down the dramatic path of The Farce of Ideas. True to form it’s about people coming through doors at the wrong time or just in time.

Upstairs is the stag party of Digby, downstairs is the hen party of his bride-to-be Mandy. Present upstairs is Eddie – Digby’s bro – and Aaron, whose relationship with Digby consists entirely of his having semi-anonymously laid the carpet in his flat. Aaron is the death of all parties and makes jokes involving ‘laid’ as verb transitive and ‘income tacks’. His presence ensures the play is included also in the Theatre of Embarrassment, just a category or two down from the gem in the genre diadem, Fawlty Towers.

Until the arrival of Gazza, Aaron is the only guest – an exigency engineered by Eddie, the party organizer, who wants revenge for the fact his bro is marrying his ex-squeeze. Carpet-laying Aaron is played by Jen Cowan, the first of many gender rope-jumps in the play. Indeed, by play’s happy ending every crew member has been both an Arthur and a Martha.

Curtis Vowell, playing Eddie in the first half becomes a stridently attractive Lizzie in the second and probably wins the prize for most glamorous other sex. Jen Cowan, however, wins the rather more meritorious prize for least attractive chromosomal transfer. She subverts her natural prettiness into a monstrous mini caricature of Chris Jack, an act of immense skill and courage and one eschewed by most fine-looking actors. (The beautiful Sylvia Rands was never averse to crossing her eyes but I can think of few others.)

The effects of ‘Follow the bouncing balls or otherwise’ are great – not least upon the budget of course – but there is a dawning and very satisfying awareness that everyone in it is at the same party. We could get coarse and talk about the fellowship of the ring being the one thing down there in common, but I choose at this juncture to get wanky and speak of chronology that approaches art, as in painting. Because this play is redolent of Art, which Gumbley was superbly in, at Centrepoint, some years ago and has been beneficially influenced by, in his writing. (Woollaston/ McCahon for a start: ‘It’s real, feel it, it’s all lumpy.’)

Plays are linear, paintings are total, but in an exercise in coalescence Gumbley has cleverly laid, as Aaron would say, one play atop another and given us a sort of 3D effect: theatre approximating art. The window cleaner’s just finished scrubbing the fourth wall and the result is a quantum bump-up of resonance.

Take Gazza as an example of what I’m blunderingly trying to say. Engagingly played by Reihana Haronga, he is having a fervid affair with voluptuous Sylvia, mother of the groom (played by Darien Tackle who is also Ralph, father of the bride; with the removal of one seminal article of supportive clothing, she transforms fine breasts into a beer pot). In part two, real-life lithe athletic Haronga becomes – in a make-over almost as profound as Cowan’s – big-bummed Raewyn, a librarian in need of love. And as Raewyn he waddles into shot while Sylvia is cell-phoning female pheromones to her lover upstairs – i.e., well… him. It’s that moment that Isaac Asimov always warned against; when the time-traveller encounters himself. Here, it’s a completed moment of theatre; that inside-out, twisted Len Lye circle that comes as close to the immediacy of art as theatre can get.

And another important thing; I had seen the Court Theatre version of this play.  Simon Vincent, who plays the lead role of Digby – as had Gumbley at Court (he’s not stupid, you write the lead role for yourself) – had not. Nor had Simon Ferry the director. And Gumbley himself has not yet seen this version of his play and had no influence on its flow. So he will be amazed, as was I, how his words – those simple words on the page – have elicited the same artistic response from the actor and director, this time round, as those he intended for himself.

Ross Gumbley is not only a fine actor, he’s a shrewd one; he has certain audience-tested, sure-fire winning mannerisms which he exploits mercilessly (my favourite is the drawn-out, lip-pursed, slightly head-weaving response to a question which culminates in his agreeing with you with a shake of his head). I amazedly learned, on opening night, the above-mentioned info – that neither protagonist nor director had been influenced by the Gumbley performance. And yet the lovely Simon Vincent – one of my favourite actors who is NZ`s best on-stage (I don’t quite know what I mean here, but you will – user of air) – Simon Vincent’s interpretation of the role was eerily reminiscent.

As a writer myself, I am cheered that words contain their own DNA. It’s a powerful affirmation of what I must assume will be the heading on the gravestone of the human race next century, when we try to excuse ourselves for the devastation we have caused to an innocent planet:  "At least we never fucked with Shakespeare."
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