Shorts is a production of Theatre Comrades, a Hawkes Bay based Theatre Company headed by Megan Peacock and Sally Richards. Peacock and Richards’ goal is to foster local and emerging performers, but to also bring quality drama to the provincial stage.

In the three short scripts by Berkoff, Pinter and Beckett they are certainly bringing a quality of theatre to The Assembly in Hastings that Hawke’s Bay theatre-goers are seldom exposed to, and although the productions are somewhat uneven, there are pleasures to be had from the three short plays.

A Piece of Monologue by Samuel Beckett is a rich and ambiguous text, and Ken Keys is vocally comfortable in the role, perhaps a little too comfortable; some vocal tension might enrich the part. Seated and static, holding an open photo album in front of him – which creates a physical barrier between character and audience – Keys becomes a stereotype, ‘the storyteller’, rather than a man deeply enmeshed in a disintegrating internal monologue.

Monologue is often delivered as direct address, but here this approach nullifies a text which implies isolation, dereliction and loss of self. I longed for Keys to turn his words inward where the real struggle is occurring and for Richards to give him motion so we could see the movement of his mind.

Peacock’s direction of Harold Pinter’s The Black and White is deft and light yet sharp, and plays perfectly to the pauses Pinter wrote so piercingly. Peacock generates a genuine poignancy in the stillnesses between the characters, aided by an evident rapport between the actors, Lorraine Jensen and Wendy Beauchamp.

Jensen manages the London accent – Pinter cannot be placed anywhere but his native land – but Beauchamp struggles, producing a fluctuation between Enzed and ‘Lundun’. Although this is a distraction, the piece is sweet and simple and real; I felt the buses, and time, passing.

Actor by Steven Berkhoff, directed by Richards, is a delightful and spontaneous performance by an actor of indubitable capability. Sam Bunkall takes what could have been, in less able hands than his and Richards’, a mannered and awkward performance, and offers wit and spontaneity with a level of realism that is engaging and immensely entertaining. Bunkall displays impressive physical and vocal control – he carries every line through to the next on a breath – and delivers us from bathos to pathos with wonderful dexterity. 

Theatre Comrades intend to challenge Hawke’s Bay theatre goers with more short plays – and I am glad. We get a lot of ‘shows’ in Hawke’s Bay and it is a pleasure to be offered theatre, flawed or faultless, that engages the intellect.
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