Rumours

Neil Simon was a prolific and award-winning playwright, his works from the 1960s such as Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple hugely popular with audiences and critics. When he wrote Rumors (sic) in 1988, his own marriage was breaking up and he thought he’d write his first farce. The focus of Simon’s work was often the everyday lives and challenges of middle-class people, exploring marital friction for laughs, so this shouldn’t have been a stretch for him.

Unlike Simon back in the eighties, it's familiar territory for Tea Tree Players, whose seasons play to their older audiences with very British farces. Simon’s own re-write to relocate New York to the English Home Counties should, in theory at least, have a safe place in their repertoire.

The story of Rumours is located at a party to celebrate the hosts’ tenth wedding anniversary. When the first couple to arrive discover the husband in bed having shot himself through the earlobe, and his wife nowhere to be seen, a fictional version of events is constructed to cover up any possible scandal of the government minister with a hole in his ear.

Three more couples arrive at convenient intervals to add more layers to the lies, built on rumours they’ve heard third-hand at the tennis club. The farce of the first act is built on not revealing the truth to the newly arrived couples; but this can’t be sustained in the second act, where the comedy comes from hiding the truth from unexpected visitors, and men pretending to be other men.

Whilst the opening scene of a panicking married couple plays out well, and the middle-class living room meets the exceptional standards of set construction from this company, it doesn’t really go anywhere beyond the slapstick, name alliteration, and ample use of the multiple entrances and exits.

Heather Riley is good as Chris Bevans, her role shifting further from her initial obedient spouse the more she drinks – her transition into tipsy and then full-on sloshed is subtle, the humour coming from her deliberately not trying to be funny. Her husband, Ken (Rick Mills), takes on most of the wordplay, and Mills milks the dialogue well, particularly in the second act.

Bec Mason as Claire Cummings plays to type as a trophy wife for Len, played with constant frustration by Tim Cousins. They’re an unlikely couple to start with, but Mason and Cousins find some chemistry later in the play.

Chris Galipo plays Cookie Cusack as 1980s Penelope Keith (a familiar British sitcom performer of that era) and Damon Hill is her meek husband Ernest, seemingly content to be mistaken for the butler by the final couple to arrive, the Coopers. Aspiring MP candidate Glenn (Adrian Heness) is over the top (i.e. spot on for farce), but is amply matched by Kristyn Barnes as Cassie, who screeches her insecurities to her contemptuous husband.

Dysfunctional marriages are the staple of farce, but these couples are sketched just enough to conform to type. And director Samuel Creighton plays out the narrative superficially, like an early 1980s television sitcom – but there are reasons why those TV shows are not shown today. Creighton never addresses the Bevans’ inequality: both are lawyers, yet it’s the husband who must take charge, the wife all too meekly agreeing with ‘I’m just a contract lawyer’. Then there’s Cousins’ characterisation of Len as a misogynist, whose bored wife is there only to ‘make me a drink’, ‘shut up’ or ‘let the men sort this out’. It’s a great performance from Cousins, his face so red with frustration that we’re genuinely fearful he’ll have a heart attack on stage. Yet his spitting words are played entirely for laughs: perhaps the intent is to ‘play it safe’ and not make a point of it, but it’s increasingly dangerous in 2023 to show this abuse without commentary – and I find it difficult to laugh for the remainder of the show, even with some genuinely funny dialogue and physical comedy.

For me, there are many missed opportunities to make serious points amongst the humour; however, this audience seems okay with it all. Looking around at the full theatre, the laughs are equally loud for the clever wordplay, slapstick, and sexism. If you’re looking for comedy that doesn’t scratch the surface of society, this might be a good night out.

Mark Wickett