Country style

Pack up your cars and picnic baskets, summer theatre heads (mostly) out of the city

SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF:
Gregory Prest and Paula Costain in Intimate Exchanges

By NEIL BOYCE

Late July, a snapshot of the city: actors and theatre directors flee the island in search of work, people lug folding chairs and beers in paper bags to neighbourhood parks to watch Shakespeare, and summer theatre rolls lazily along...

An hour’s drive out in the country takes you to Theatre Lac Brome, in Knowlton, now in the midst of a busy repertory program that has them rotating four English-language productions.

Alan Ayckbourn, maybe the world’s most performed living playwright—and record-holder for once having five plays running simultaneously in London’s West End—is revisited in his sharply written comedy Intimate Exchanges, starring Paula Costain and Gregory Prest. The idea that the most trivial daily choices one makes can lead to wildly different outcomes is the starting point for Ayckbourn’s intricate puzzle. Creating eight plays out of one, the story begins with a character’s decision to smoke or not to smoke, then branches out into separate plays and endings (which ones of the cycle the director has chosen is not stated).

Local scribe Ricky Blue has summer theatre sewn up with multiple productions going on in two out-of-town venues, beginning with his paean to Old Blue Eyes, Let’s Be Frank, now underway at Theatre Lac Brome. Neil Napier and Laura Teasdale star, with Nicholas Pynes (also artistic director of the theatre) on piano.

Another Ricky Blue project, The Four Anglos of the Apocalypse, is resurrected for The 25th Century Belongs to Canada as Blue, his Siamese twin George Bowser, Josh Freed and Terry (Aislin) Mosher continue shaking their tiny anglo fists at the Péquistes on their lawn in a mix of song, satire and cartoon. Elsewhere off-island, Blue’s post-midlife comedy Campbell’s Sutra continues at Hudson Village Theatre.

Completing the Lac Brome roster, Laura Teasdale’s Woodswalker is an outdoor performance based on a historic tale from Brome County.

After kicking off their season at the Old Port, Repercussion Theatre continue an active summer of theatre-in-the-park with The Tempest/la tempête, notably, tomorrow, Friday, July 25 with an English-language performance at Théâtre de Verdure in Lafontaine park. It’s the first major staging here of Shakespeare’s dark comedy since Madd Harold (of the brilliant and much-lamented Gravy Bath Productions) mounted a production in 2004, so there are large boots to fill—but an outdoor setting at dusk would seem a very sympathetic setting for this tale of shipwreck, magic and intrigue. Complete schedule available at repercussiontheatre.com

Finally, Express O Theatre at the Montreal School of Performing Arts presents Tony Devaney Morinelli’s slapstick The Washtub Farce, directed by Josa Maule, in a tale of a “woman’s wiles and a husband’s hell.”

The one-act medieval play, about a wife who conspires with the devil to get her husband to do all the housework, is loaded with broad slapstick: there’s an attempted drowning in a washtub and generally plenty of people getting beaten up. Stage directions in the text even describe how to make a true vaudevillian slap-stick (with appropriate padding) to allow the actor playing the husband to withstand the blows administered by his wife. Bring the whole family.

Theatre Lac Brome (9 Mont-Echo, Knowlton)
Tickets: theatrelacbrome.ca; Hudson
Village Theatre (28 Wharf Road, Hudson)
Tickets: villagetheatre.ca; Montreal School
of Performing Arts (3975 Notre-Dame W.)
Tickets: (514) 483-5526.