I generally enjoy Barry Lakeman’s short play writing. He likes to play with genres and each piece is usually well crafted with distinctive characters, say-able dialogue and good dramatic structure, and infused with some kind of humour.

Being short – this itinerant Play With Your Food season serves up four plays within two hours, including three intervals – they tend not to outstay their welcomes. “If you don’t like one of them,” Lakeman observes in the publicity material, “there will be another one along soon.” Fair enough.

Putting them on in inner-suburban restaurants with basic lighting and sound facilities, in a space not designed for performance, lowers our expectations of production values, which is also fair enough. Having to rise above such odds can bring out the best in actors.

Unfortunately the uneven acting skills among this seven-actor co-op, as seen at Oriental Bay’s Beach Babylon last Monday night, undermines the potential entertainment value of the programme. Also, playing them against a side wall in a long narrow ‘dog leg’ space affords poor sight lines for most of the audience where some sort of traverse orientation would have been better.

The lacklustre introductions from writer-director Lakeman don’t help either, although I can see why he prefers to be low-key rather than hype it up with showbiz pizzazz. Keeping the expectations low means the only way is up.

Happy Birthday, Margaret! is a domestic comedy that turns ‘black’. Grown children, whose personal lives are variously dysfunctional, come ‘home’ for their Mum’s birthday, play board games with their ever-ebullient Dad while she slaves in the kitchen alone, then take the moral high ground when she turns out to have been less than saintly in her marriage. But there is more than space-saving and energy conservation behind the lounge room having been locked up and unused …

Jeff Osborne, as Terry, the father, bellows all the way through and Kim Smith, as Margaret – whose awkwardness could be justified by the character’s secrets – shouts to match him. This leaves Elle Wootton’s Rebecca (the single-again daughter) and Tom Martin’s Simon (the married son whose wife and child haven’t come) to establish some level of familial credibility, which they do.

Terry’s sister Janine (Irene Miller) and nephew Jeffrey (Andrew Edgar) pop in briefly, largely to increase the awkwardness of the situation, it seems. The tag line mirror’s that of Roger Hall’s Middle Age Spread – “What are we going to do now?” – although the answer is not “The dishes” but “Play more Trivial Pursuits”. And yes, this is the way some people live their lives.

In Cast, Wooton and Martin play “two characters in search of reality”, riffing on the proposition that their existence is only possible because someone has written them into a play. They delight in earnest consideration of the metaphysics – which are recycled in ever-decreasing iterations – and play off each other well. Wootton especially proves to bring a strong, well-centred emotional intelligence to her role, which draws us into her world and concerns. She’s good.

Described by its author as “an absolutely silly comedy”, S.W.A.L.K finds three witches – Guhilde (Smith), Avril (Wootton) and Esmeralda (Miller) – attempting to accommodate a ‘temp’ to maintain the coven’s quorum (the minimum is three, apparently, to maintain effectiveness), while Esmeralda goes on holiday. Unfortunately Avicore (Martin) has taken the form of a seal …

A welter of stock conundrums and cracker-style ‘jokes’, allowing for audience participation, may or may not have something to do with lifting the spell, which finally happens with unexpected results. The modern day version of a witch’s broomstick offers a good sight-gag to end on.

Reunion in Columbus, set in Ohio USA, dramatises the umpteenth committee meeting to plan a family reunion and the accurately-depicted petty minutiae of meeting procedure had one table in hysterics last Monday night. Michael (Edgar), Danny (Lakeman), Carsten (Osborne), Anna (Smith) and Vicky (Miller) bring their stock roles alive, with the women developing some good non-verbal byplay.

The dramatic objective appears to be (as with Happy Birthday, Margaret!) to prick the bubble of moral hypocrisy, with an email from a distant relative in NZ being the catalyst. Unfortunately the pay-off falls flat for lack of a well-wrought set up (i.e. I assumed all the committee members were part of the ever-extending family and it needs to be made clear that one of them is not for the punchline to work).

Barry Lakeman is ‘one of nature’s playwrights’ in that his experience and observations of life constantly provoke him to make plays. Every community needs such people. It is sad that our better resourced professional theatres have not been constantly hungry for the work of such writers, and committed to their development, so that their plays and talents could reach their full potential.

These plays need rigorous directing and creative actors able to do much more than remember their lines and not bump into the furniture.
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