Fully Committed

For the past three years, the foyer of the Pavilion Theatre at Castle Hill has become the venue for short seasons of one or two productions a year for Castle Hill Players. Seating about 70 people on folding chairs arranged around low tables, it’s a cosy space with bar service before and after the show. This is an innovative experiment that should appeal to directors – and actors – who want to try something that doesn’t really need to be ‘main stage’.

Thus it would seem a perfect space for Paul Sztelma to direct Becky Mode’s 90 minute one-hander, Fully Committed.

The play is set in the cluttered basement switchboard of a “four-star, multi-award- winning, ridiculously trendy Upper East side Manhattan restaurant”. You know the scenario … booked out months and months in advance … unless you’re famous, or terribly wealthy, or notorious, or know the chef!

It’s winter, Christmas is approaching, everyone wants a table, and the phone is running super hot! Sam, an aspiring actor, is on his own coping with the switchboard as well as the intercom to the restaurant – and the dreaded ‘red phone’ to the chef.

As well as Sam himself, the actor is required to ‘play’ the 40 different voices/characters that bombard him over a plethora of calls. It’s a mighty feat – and there are few in community theatre who could do it as well as Peter Rhodes.

Calling on and unbounded energy and a wealth of experience, (before returning to Australia and settling in the Hills district, he played 300 roles in the 16 years he spent with a repertory company that toured 43 weeks a year across nine countries), Rhodes establishes each of the characters with singular clarity and a totally different demeanour.

As his accent changes for each, so do his facial expressions and attitude – mouth, teeth, eyebrows, shoulders, body are all called in to establish each of the 40 callers. The bruising, aggressive chef; the progressively angry Carolann Rosenstein-Fishburn; the busy Maitre d’ Jean Claude; and Sam’s gentle, patient recently-widowed father. All are clear and totally believable, despite the fact that during the ninety minutes things become more and more frenetic.

Pace is paramount in this production and pace is where Sztelma and Rhodes both excel. Sztelma is a dab hand at directing (and performing in) farce, and Rhodes has the experience and energy to match his demanding and creative direction of this clever script which results in a production that just gets faster and faster and funnier and funnier.

It’s worth getting out to Castle Hill to see what good community theatre practitioners can do!  

Carol Wimmer