Take a Chance on Me at the Bruce Mason Centre

By FRANCIS TILL

A sold-out run at the Maidment last year has brought this Auckland Theatre Company production of a Roger Hall masterpiece back, this time to the 900-seat Bruce Mason auditorium, with Janice Finn still at the directorial helm.

The story is both simple and labyrinthine: three women and three men, each left unexpectedly and suddenly single after years of marriage, try to rekindle their personal lives while exploring what has happened to them. Completely stripped of wallow here, the process is layered with nuggets of wry comedic gold interleaved with bits of farcical silver.

In this new version, there's also a welcome emphasis on purely physical comedy, often involving states of undress, which adds considerable zing to the zest already in the script.

The hapless six are overseen by two omnipresent narrators, masterfully played by Jennifer Ludlam as Liz and Stuart Devenie as Eric, who also pepper the play with brilliant cameos in a wild array of other guises. (Devenie's bicycle messenger is not to be missed, for all that the appearance is, ah, brief, and the pair have developed the art of playing querulous children to its zenith.)

Three of the four female roles have been recast, and the inspired choice of Jodie Dorday (lawyer Eleanor) adds so much to the play that if nothing else had changed it would still be worth a second look.

The returning players have all put new energy into the work, and Peter Elliott (poor Tim the pharmacist) and Greg Johnson (Brian the inveterate Westie) have added much to roles they had well wrapped last time.

Hall rewrites as he watches his works in performance, and he must have watched this one with an especially gimlet eye.

But given that he changed so much, it is a little surprising that he didn't go here for a less fraught foil to Brian's randy naivete in his scene with a Thai mail-order wife. Ludlam doesn't seem entirely comfortable within the undeveloped stereotype, or at least the language it forces on her, and that only heightens the undue emphasis the skit receives.