Review: Repertory Theatre, C eca (Venue 50)

This is repertory theatre. We know this because the artistic director tells us, and the bookish young playwright sitting across the desk from him, that it’s repertory theatre.****

This is repertory theatre, and he’s glad the playwright has brought him a new play about the playwright’s father. He knew his father well, of course, before dad literally died on stage. It’s not about my father, pleads the playwright in vain. The artistic director isn’t listening. He appears to be off in his own world.

Despite its initially nonsensical appearance, this play from Israel’s The Elephant and the Mouse company is a dazzling and unique piece of work: a meditation on playwriting structure and theatrical performance; a radical, avant garde reworking of Hamlet; and a damn funny comedy, all at once.

Actors Erez Drigues and Iftach Jeffrey Ophir, performing a work by Eldad Cohen and translated by Ophir, give tour de force performances in a piece which demands perfect timing and acute physical reflexes. It is multiple narratives folded back on one another, the impressive structural design allowing single player’s performances to be transplanted from scene to scene.

It is, on one level, a clever-clever in-joke for theatregoers and theatremakers alike; the artistic director’s obsession with Hamlet, the snippets of Shakespeare’s play performed and the overriding layer of paternal angst all ringing bells.

Yet even for those who don’t wish to deconstruct what they’re watching, it’s continually laugh-out-loud funny, from a masterfully spun-out gag about the word “Hamlet” demanding those who hear it rise to their feet, to a smooth demolition of the fourth wall when the pair imagine the ghost seats of the old theatre before them: “Ugly chairs, no air conditioning … a phone rings on vibrate.” Those in the front rows might want to take a tissue for the spectacularly phlegmatic over-emoting.

Until 18 August. Today 6:15pm.