Plays about stand up comedy are notoriously difficult to pull off. British playwright Trevor Griffiths had a rather earnest but thought-provoking crack at it in 1975 with Comedians. More recently and closer to home, Gavin McGibbon used it to delineate a problematic relationship in Stand Up Love (2007).

Now Will Agnew – who enrolled in the Victoria University / International Institute of Modern Letters MA in Script Writing course in 2011 – has taken it on for his first stage play: Stand Up For Charlie.

The premise is strong, and well publicised, so this is not a spoiler: “A group of stand up comedians deal with grief, guilt and responsibility after the celebrity they verbally destroy at a comedy roast commits suicide.”

Charlie Knox (Chris Swney, who also directs) is the star of a hit TV sitcom and may or may not be “a stale, drug-addicted hack” and a bastard to his wife Lucy (Livvy Nonoa), who may or may not be a slut (sorry but that’s nothing compared with the ‘hate speech’ language that gets bandied about in the name of comedy).

It’s Charlie’s bitter and twisted co-star – or rather second-fiddle also-ran – Cameron Gunn (Jason Tolley) who leads the charge at the celebrity roast. Initially he seems to be solely responsible for provoking the suicide but later, in flashbacks, we find that Lucy and Charlie’s bother Andy (Kent Lambert) – less talented but still desperately keen to make it in stand up – have also had a good gnaw at the bone while standing at the mic.

These characters are well-conceived and played with an emotionally-rooted authenticity that makes us care about them, despite their flaws. Nonoa’s Lucy is especially impressive in her non-verbal responses to the slings and arrows inflicted on her and delightfully surprising in manifesting Lucy’s later behaviours.

Thanks to them I am happy to buy the developing story, grotesque as it is, as a searing satire on the sociopathic nature of stand-up comedy, as practiced by some. Comedians are a race apart and here is a chance to examine what make them tick – or a certain sub-species of them, anyway.

Bruce Colban also does well, albeit in a more heighted comic mode, as ‘various public servants’, the most memorable being his perving Gravedigger.

The first thing to derail the play, however, is Charlie and Cameron’s facile mugging in the sit-com flashbacks. If it was that bad it would never have been the success it is supposed to be and Charlie would never have been the celebrity the plot requires him to have been. By opting for shallow send up, any depth the play may have achieved is recklessly scuttled.

What turns it into a total train wreck, however, is the gross over-acting of Michael Pocock in the role of ‘reality’ TV producer Tayne Gondoli. Yes, the media world does include some pretentious, preening, egotistical scumbags but they do have to have some degree of charm and charisma to survive let alone succeed in their fields.

Put simply, we can’t see the character for the acting and its coarseness erodes and corrodes every scene he is in. From where I sit I am unable to tell whether he is uncontrollable or has been encouraged to play it this way but if the director and playwright are complicit in this I can only hope they see now what a very wrong move it is.

The potential for the already twisted moral fibre of Cameron, Lucy and Andy to be tested to breaking point when tempted by the fame of ‘reality’ show stardom is great, in principle, but there has to be credibility in the way it plays out for us to even begin to grapple with the implications, let alone ask ourselves, “what would I do?”. And if the play is not asking that of us, what are we here for?

Despite these flaws there are enough well-wrought exchanges of dialogue and riveting moments of truth as credible characters respond to life’s shocking realities to prove this playwright has potential and maybe the play does too.

Afterwards I find myself conjecturing that the script may have been quite sound to begin with (see the premise above) but during rehearsals they – the director perhaps and/or the playwright – got bored with it, as can so easily happen with comedies, and so introduced random and ill-judged meta-theatrical tricks to keep themselves amused. Or maybe there were earnest intellectual rationalisations for the mash up of styles. We can only guess.

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