Capturing the comedy and the pathos of relationships - Arundel production

Farce and Furious is at The Victoria Institute in Arundel on Thursday, December 1, Friday December 2 and Saturday, December 3, with performances at 8pm. The first half comprises a longer play; David will be directing the three shorter plays that make up the second half.

“I live just near Rudgwick and the reason I have ended up with Drip Action is because a group in Cranleigh that I was involved with before the lockdowns dropped away and so I was trawling around anywhere I could drive looking for the kind of company that did the kind of work that I was interested in, small casts and straight plays. I've done a lot of Pinter in the past both as a director and an actor and that's the kind of thing I was wanting to do. I came across Drip Action and I saw that they were doing the kind of stuff that I like and so I got involved and I found myself very rapidly directing these short plays for this evening. I'm doing the three short plays that are in the second half. Someone else's directing the first half which is a longer piece of maybe 40 minutes. But they are all by Rich Orloff who is a New Yorker and we knew relatively little about him but (Drip Action artistic director and founder) Bill Brennan picked up the name because he is always on the look-out for new pieces by different people. Bill did a call for new scripts and his name cropped up and they did a play of his in the summer which went very well. It was very much a New York Jewish piece and these pieces are very much in the same vein. The three short pieces I'm directing are all about couples at key moments in their relationships. It really captures both the comedy and the pathos of relationships in a very American way, those American plays that are not about the big important moments and big important people. These are plays that are about the intimate moments. The three pieces are from a larger collection which he calls Small Miracles and it's all about those key points in relationships, the meeting, the breaking-up, the revealing of affairs, all those things where couples are forced to have a conversation which makes them step out of their normal coupledom. The total company for the evening is seven. There are six in the first half and then in the second-half with the three plays there are two people in each, just the couples – older and middle and beginning of relationships.

“I have done theatre since appearing in a Nativity at the age of six. I've been acting for 50 years or so. It has always been a sideline. I've never quite had the nerve to do this for a living but when you do it for a hobby you find that you have good opportunities to be involved in some of the great plays of English theatre and you don't have to do it every day for weeks! I have friends in the profession and success is doing the same play for 12 weeks or maybe getting to appear in a soap opera. But the good thing with this is anticipation, the building up to it and enjoying it and then bang it is done in a week. We are only doing three performances which is perhaps a bit short. I would have liked to have had five or six performances but these are interesting pieces.”