It’s tough getting old, with body and mind slowing, while all the pressures and constraints impinging upon your life are getting harsher and less familiar. Here, Kiwi octogenarians Harold and Laura Stacey, fed up, mount a revolt against these, and a kind of revenge-seeking upon `the system’ as a whole, by holding up their bank-branch with a shot-gun.

Still, this play is not so much a plot-driven crime story as an exploring of the potentials of the resulting situation, and of how the people involved live their lives. And `the system,’ here, aka `the market,’ turns out to be no less brutal and callous than they had concluded it was.

Premiered in 2004, this is a late work by a writer who had emerged before Roger Hall, and while always interesting, often funny and clever, one that is harder to bring off than a play with stronger plot-dynamics.
The current production will be fine when it’s settled in.

Dale Hendry provides an admirably modulated performance as Harold, a man struggling to reaffirm some potency and dignity, despite needing a zimmer frame to get around. Shirley Kelly’s Laura is more in the realm of situational comedy, intimidating her hostages with knitting needles.

Jen Cowan’s eager, helpful, ambitious bank-teller is neatly contrasted with Sonia Yee’s cynical, stuff-the-customers counterpart. Rob Lloyd is capable as the bank-branch manager, and Reihana Haronga vital and expressive as the customer-hostage. The characterisation is convincing.

The set works well, and other production-values are sound. While this is a good play rather than an excellent one, it is well worth offering, and patronising. It will be quite adequately enjoyable.
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A good idea handled with insufficient delicacy, Joe Musaphia’s Ugly Customers is the simple story of two charming old dears who decide to take some profitable revenge on a world that has passed them by. Vaguely Roger Hall-esque (John Hodgkinson’s wonderfully unappealing set is a vision of the modern workplace as a cheap fluorescent Hell, and the character relationships have a similar Gliding On feel) but held back by a undernourished script, it is a play which offers much to like but little to really enthuse over.

It’s a shame, because Ugly Customers cries out to be loved; it overflows with cute characters and comic promise. The play’s heroes are an elderly couple whom society has deemed not only useless but feeble-minded to boot. In a botched attempt to get something back from a future that failed to deliver on its promises, they hold up their local bank, their old-fashioned manners impacting upon the largely detestable staff. It’s the perfect set-up for crowd-pleasing antics and humorous generational clashes.

Unfortunately, Musaphia’s heavy-handed expository clarification of his theme comes to resemble the patronising corporate-speak and baby-talk offered by the bank’s appalling manager. The comedy, which rests largely on archetypes and the inversion of verbal cliché, is similarly heavy-handed, and in the end – despite the play’s critique of society’s dismissal of age and experience – one leaves the theatre feeling that some youthful edge and vigour, a few new ideas, is exactly what Ugly Customers needs.

Harold and Laura Stacy, in their eighties, childless, are staunch defenders of a time when people mattered: "If You Don’t Think Customers Are Important," reads Harold’s favourite corporate maxim, "Try Doing Business Without Them." So when their cat is taken from them by an unfeeling landlord, they decide to make things right by robbing the local branch of the totally fictional, if ASB-coloured, South Pacific Bank. Maybe armed theft is the normal human response to accommodation disputes – I would probably have tried the Tenancy Tribunal first – but armed solely with a sawn-off shotgun and a shaky grip on hold-up etiquette, Harold and Laura decide to use the situation to teach the unfeeling branch manager a little something about customer service.

It’s not a bad set-up for satire and slapstick, and there are some fun moments, particularly from Dale Hendry’s Harold, whose fierce internal battle over what’s more important – will it be the money or the courtesy? – leads to some richly comic exchanges with Rob Lloyd’s cartoony branch manager. For the most part, though, it’s just about two old people angry that a couple of tellers were rude to them, and the social commentary falls flat. The play is well-intentioned but ultimately unsatisfying; and the road to theatrical oblivion is paved with vague intentions.

If there was simply a vacuum at its centre, Ugly Customers might still have made it. Unfortunately, the plotting and dialogue are similarly sketchy (vagueness in the latter, particularly, is fatal to comedy). The old couple themselves probably have the worst of it. The otherwise impressive Hendry is forced to deliver dialogue so laboured ("I hate that phrase ‘at this point in time’! I don’t see any point in time!") it breaks both dramatic tension and comedic flow. Centrepoint stalwart Shirley Kelly, as Laura, is simply required to flap around aimlessly centre-stage.

The other characters are asked to behave totally inexplicably, often in ways that contradict not only their established characterizations but logic itself. When Harold, for instance, decides to investigate the time lock on the safe out back, he initially takes with him as hostage the smirking branch manager. Realizing the other staff wouldn’t care if "Mr Manning" was given some ad hoc ventilation, however, Harold does the only sensible thing; he decides to point the gun at his wife instead ("Don’t get me turned into smithereens," she constantly bleats). For some reason, this threat to kill his own wife of sixty years convinces the others of the necessity to stay in their seats. It provoked the opposite impulse in me.

The cast do try gamely to put some flesh on the faded outlines of their characters. Rob Lloyd’s constipated strut and neurotic preening make his Mr Manning probably the most developed cipher of the lot; Reihana Haronga is the other stand-out, his misunderstood parking warden Barry dancing successfully along the edge of stereotype (his action set piece in the second half, a piece of gloriously incompetent manoeuvring set to the Mission: Impossible theme, is the one sequence in which the comedy really fires). The problem is, no matter the not inconsiderable talents of the cast, and the reliably solid direction of Simon Ferry, there’s just very little for them to work with.

Musaphia positions the Stacys as a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde (the theme for which, just to make the analogy explicit, plays during the final fade-out), but where’s the joie de vivre, the recklessness, that makes the 1920s gangsters so attractively emulative? The Stacys seem for the most part simply tired, and the play is less a rallying call than a resigned sigh. What makes this such a pity is there’s a very funny idea in Ugly Customers kicking to get out: disenfranchised outsiders try to rob a business and keep getting distracted by the temptation to teach the staff some manners (it could have been a broadly comic Falling Down).

The play is meant to be a defence of old-time humanism, but its effect is quite the opposite: it’s a dramatised curmudgeonly rant, and a poorly thought out one at that.
 

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