Pluck!

Pluck! is described as a black comedy that "grapples head on with love, lust, God and what (if anything) it means to be a man." True enough, snippets of all those thematic concerns were presented throughout this truly odd play, albeit in an extremely piecemeal way. It is the story of one Dr Pluck (Brendan Ewing), an unlikeable, self-deluded egotist who is, inexplicably, married to a woman with whom he seems to have no chemistry or connection whatsoever. After they are robbed at gunpoint, Pluck is inspired to get fitter and think about buying a gun, both of which pump up his ego and virility. He and his wife then meet their new neighbours, who coincidentally turn out to be the woman who cleans his office and her husband, the unsympathetic and macho policeman to whom they earlier reported their mugging. The policeman encourages Pluck to purchase an illegal firearm, Pluck gets "a hunch" that the policeman beats his wife (he conveniently saw bruises on her neck while she was cleaning his office), the wife confesses this and seeks refuge in the Plucks’ home, and there's a confrontation followed by a shootout.

Such an utterly contrived shaggy dog story might be excusable if it was genuinely funny, but alas the laughs were nowhere to be found. Brendan Ewing spent most of the performance declaiming his lines rather than acting, and in place of emoting he simply raised his voice and shouted, which became very wearing. In what must have been a deliberate directorial choice, Mr Ewing played each scene with constant knowing looks at the audience - in fact he spent most of the performance looking directly at, and addressing, the audience rather than his fellow actors. True, the script did call for occasional moments in which Mr Ewing delivered monologues with apparent awareness of the audience’s presence, but his performance effectively broke the fourth wall in every single scene - destroying any last lingering attempt at suspension of disbelief for the audience.

The three other actors fared little better, with Michaela Bedel as Pluck's wife failing to create any sense of why she tolerated him, and Todd Levi as the policeman delivering a deliberately over the top caricature in place of a characterisation.

I should also mention another odd directorial decision, that of staging an oral sex scene between Pluck and his wife which included handfuls of 'stage semen' being dripped around the set and even an erect penis head sticking out of Pluck's underpants. Again presumably this was meant to be funny (especially the bit where the Plucks' dog licks up the semen), but in the absence of humour it came across as gratuitous, not to mention extremely crass.

I think of myself as having a good sense of humour, and a good appreciation of black comedy, but I couldn't find anything redeemable in this. "It's a tale about a couple who reignite their passion for each other through blood and gore," the director Alan Chambers is quoted as saying in the publicity blurb, and that's a fair summation. But if you, like me, are left scratching your head wondering how this can possibly work as a believable story, seeing Pluck! won’t leave you any the wiser.

Alex Paige