Shaw Festival 2023/ On the Razzle by Tom Stoppard, directed by Craig Hall, Royal George Theatre, Apr. 16 to Oct.8. Tickets here.
Sometimes playwrights just want to have fun, but also, sometimes, productions let them down. Such is the case of the Shaw Festival’s On the Razzle.
Unlike Tom Stoppard’s other plays that are filled to the brim with intellectual pursuits, philosophical musings and subterranean depths, the British playwright’s On the Razzle (1981) is nothing, more or less, than a good old-fashioned farce.
The provenance of On the Razzle is fascinating.
The first incarnation of the plot was the one-act play, A Day Well Spent (1835), by English dramatist John Oxenford. Austrian Johann Nestroy extended the farce into a full-length version with his opus, Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842), which roughly translates as, He Wants to Make a Joke.
Enter American Thornton Wilder. He first used the material in The Merchant of Yonkers (1938) which was faithful to the Nestroy original. For his second version, The Matchmaker (1955), Wilder expanded the small role of Dolly Gallagher Levi into the main character, which, of course, led to the Jerry Herman musical, Hello Dolly! (1964).
Be warned, however. While the basic plot will certainly seem familiar, Dolly is not a character in On the Razzle. For his inspiration, Stoppard went back to the Nestroy original.
On the razzle means to go on a spree, and when suburban greengrocer Herr Zangler (Ric Reid) goes off to Vienna, his clerk Weinberl (Mike Nadajewski) and apprentice Christopher (Kristi Frank), use their boss’ absence as an excuse to go on the razzle to Vienna themselves. In the capital, the two employees keep running into Zangler, and have to find various ways of escaping.
Stoppard is arguably the greatest wordsmith writing in English today, and while On the Razzle may be just a farce, (or Stoppard Lite, as one wag cleverly called it), the brilliance of the language elevates the silly plot to a celestial Stoppardian plane. In his hands, the play is an overwrought exercise of dizzying verbal gymnastics.
Amid the bizarre coincidences, slapstick shenanigans, mistaken identities, and misdirected romances, the actors have to negotiate through a barrage of complicated wordplay that includes malapropisms, double entendres, tongue twisters, spoonerisms, and groan-worthy puns.
Alas, it Stoppard’s very language that causes director Craig Hall’s production of On the Razzle to falter.
Farce has to function at breakneck speed, yet, at the same time, the audience has to have time to absorb what is being said. It’s a fine line — to maintain ferocious pacing while maintaining a clarity of language.
While some like Reid and Nadajewski are excellent farceurs, the rest of the 15-member cast is at various degrees of delivery, not to mention spouting a variety of accents with no consistency. This uneven ensemble, unfortunately, sinks the ship, and quite early on, the play stops being funny and becomes laboured, even boring.
Veteran designer Christina Poddubiuk has managed to cram all manner of set pieces onto the stage, but the look is cluttered, and the scene transitions are awkward.
In other words, very little in director Hall’s sloppy and careless production works.
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