KEY POINTS:
Promoting Neil La Bute's Some Girl(s) as a romantic comedy is a bit like giving someone a box of chocolates with broken-glass centres.
This is not to say that the Silo's production is like eating broken glass but it is curious that it is programmed as part of the Comedy Festival.
Some Girl(s) is reminiscent of the movies Broken Flowers and High Fidelity with many bitter laughs at the expense of commitment-phobic men. In this case the baddy du jour is an everyman called Guy, a successful writer who is just about to be married.
Instead of choosing menus and flowers with his finance, Guy is revisiting old girlfriends with a self-stated goal of righting old wrongs. Being in a La Bute play, his odyssey is less about his sudden discovery of a moral backbone and more about Guy making sure he is not missing out on anything.
Other La Bute works have been accused of misogyny and Some Girl(s) almost feels as if the author is letting the girls get one back.
In the central role of Guy, Roy Snow nails the character's key contradiction that he is somehow both likeable and contemptible. One female audience member yelled "Arsehole!" on the night I was there.
Jacque Drew is painfully vulnerable as Sam, the high school girlfriend Guy deserted just before the prom. While Kiwis can't necessarily relate to the gravity of this betrayal, Drew's performance helps us understand its devastating effect.
Alison Bruce gives a spiky, intelligent portrayal as Lindsay, the older married woman whose life was nearly destroyed by Guy, and Michelle Langstone finds inner strength as the morally outraged Bobbi, who is most effective at challenging Guy's delusions.
Overall the five-strong cast gave very strong performances but the stand-out for me was Madeleine Sami as the free spirit Tyler. She gave a sexy, slinky performance that snaked around the stage like a slipstream of smoke from a post-coital cigarette.
Rachel Walker's set has the perfect beige, bland opulence of a modern hotel, giving a neutral backdrop for the actors' fiery outbursts. The most clever feature is the screens forming the wall of the hotel room and adjoining corridor. With a change of light the heavy flocked wallpaper becomes translucent so we can see the nervous preparations of each woman as she prepares to enter and confront her heartbreaker.
Jordan Greatbatch's jazz-influenced soundtrack, the formal furniture and the Zambesi costumes from Justine Hunter gave the show polished production values that stood up to the intimacy of the Silo experience.
Some Girl(s) is not as audaciously provocative as other La Bute plays staged by the Silo but it has enough of his complexity and cynicism to make for an interesting night out.
