Death By Chocolate

Death By Chocolate
By Paul Freed. Castle Hill Players. Pavilion Theatre, Castle Hill. 20 June to 12 July 2014.

It is easy to see why this play is popular with community theatre companies. It has a big cast, it’s a mystery (well … not quite in the league of Agatha Christie but …) and it’s funny. All qualities that seem to attract many community theatre patrons. That means good ticket sales – and a little bit of profit to subsidise less popular, but more challenging, productions.

That being said, the play itself is, as inferred above, not particularly well written. The playwright relies on a series of two dimensional characters, ‘jokes’ and asides and some almost comic-book dialogue that becomes a little tedious in the first half of the play. Not until the second act is there any real tension or tight dialogue. 

Nevertheless, there are some funny moments and the preview audience responded well to the puns, jokes and the stereotypical characters that emerge one after the other in the main office of the Meadowbrook Health Resort, a converted American mansion. The set, designed by Rodger Wishart, works well. The book-lined walls of the converted drawing room hover above the stage where a leather chesterfield and desk dominate.

Annette Snars plays Lady Riverdale, anxious to re-open the resort after the untimely (and suspicious) death of the previous owner, Henry Meadowbrook. Todd Beilby plays John Stone recently employed as resort manager. The banter between these two characters, both larger-than-life but equally shallow, in the opening scenes of the play, creates the context for the chaos that ensues. Both reveal, through their superficiality, a past that may not augur well for success.

Answering their constant demands is their assistant, Dyslexia, played with stressed confusion by Lija Simpson. This is one of the more realistic characters of the play and Simpson builds on this, making the character believable and consistent and adding pace in her scenes.

The other employees – Ralph Deadwood the gym manager (Richard Ifield), Alfred Mellox, a butler-cum-factotem (Dennis Channells), “Sweet Pea” Meadowbrook (Anthea Brown), Dick Simmering, a camp, pink-clad aerobics instructor (Gavin Woodford), Edith Chiles, the luckless cook (Penelope Johnson) and Anne, the resort nurse (Emma Widderstrom) – are as superficial as their names suggest.

Outsiders, Margaret Daniels, a reporter, and Ed Parlor, a playwright, are given a little more depth in the writing, and Therese Bean and Paul Seitz make the most of this by developing solid characters. Both play almost straight foils to Beilby’s pompous, blustering Stone, especially in the second act, where the pace and connectivity of the scenes are better managed.

Director Bernard Teuben and his team have aimed to make colour and light a feature of the design of this production. Hopefully the pace and timing, especially in the first act, will pick up sufficiently to sustain this.

Carol Wimmer

Photographer: Chris Lundie

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