Scamp Film and Theatre Ltd., Fiery Angel Ltd., ACT Productions Limited and Bob Boyett
in association with Birmingham Repertory Theatre
present the European première of
FUDDY MEERS
by David Lindsay-Abaire
REVIEWS
Birmingham EVENING MAIL Tuesday, April 20th 2004
A madcap challenge
FUDDY MEERS
Birmingham Repertory Theatre
A WOMAN who loses her memory every day, her mother recovering from a stroke, and an escaped disfigured criminal claiming to be her brother.
Add in a husband with a shady past and a convict who only expresses himself through a foul-mouthed puppet and it can only mean one thing...
David Lindsay-Abaire's madcap, eccentric comedy is appearing for the first time on the European stage with the help of an Anglo-US cast, after premiering in New York in 1999.
Despite two Olivier Awards to her name, and a string of stage and television credits, this must be one of Julia McKenzie's most unusual and challenging roles.
She delivers her lines entirely in "stroke talk" due to Gertie's dramatically impaired speech, but accomplishes the feat admirably.
Katie Finneran superbly takes on the role of daughter Claire, who wakes up each morning with no recollection of even the day before, while ,stage and TV star Nicholas Le Prevost is her apparently well meaning husband.
Stourbridge-born Angus Jackson's splendid direction also brings out the best in Tim Hopper, who lays claim to be Claire's brother Zack.
But special credit is due to Hollywood star Matthew Lillard, currently to be seen in Scooby Doo II, who hilariously plays both Millet and his puppet Binky.
Fuddy Meers continues at The Door until May 8.
TONY COLLINS
The Birmingham Post Wednesday, April 21st 2004
Vaguely disturbing parable
Fuddy Meers
The Door, Birmingham Repertory Theatre
In respectable Theatre of the Absurd structures, Christ descends in an aeroplane, as a kind of deus ex machina, to tidy things up.
But in David Lindsay-Abaire's little metaphorical parable upon our absurdist, dysfunctional society nobody arrives to tie up anything and so nobody lives happily ever after.
The two-hour traffic of this particular stage is set around the perilous to-ings and fro-ings of Claire. a woman who is a serious amnesiac who wakens each day with no memory at all, but with an instruction manual prepared by her husband which tells her how to get from area to area of the day ahead.
We meet Claire as she encounters a line-up of the bizarre and the lunatic. In this crazy universe she is kidnapped by a man with a lisp and a limp who claims to be her brother, then her husband. There is a knife-wielding mother who suffers from a speech defect (the title of the play means "funny mirrors") due to a stroke.
A teenage son who is an aggressive junkie adds to the list along with a convict on the run whose alter ego is a petulant puppet.
The surreal and the absurd combine more successfully in Act Two where I at last warmed to these anarchic characters who spoof the conventions of serious family life.
The actors serve their author faithfully and amongst others I admired Nicholas Le Prevost as Claire's husband, Katie Finneran (Claire), Tim Hopper (Limping Man), Julia McKenzie (Gertie - the mother) and Matthew Lillard (Millet). But frankly once is enough, thank you, although director Angus Jackson marshals his actors skillfully.
Running time: Two hours. Until May 8.
Richard Edmonds
Daily Express Wednesday, May 26th 2004
American beauty of a comedy is so fuddy
Sheridan Morley
First Night
FUDDY Meers (and if that title puzzles you as much as it did me, it refers to the 'funny mirrors' you get in amusement arcades) eventually opened at the Arts Theatre in the West End last night, delayed a week because there was a daft diary clash with Chichester.
Otherwise the news is all good: Not only does this production launch the long-awaited new production company of Sam Mendes, back with us in the West End after his Oscar-winning triumph with American Beauty, but it is a wonderfully weird and touching US comedy which goes a long way toward making up for a London theatreland full of minor and ancient American TV and film actors apparently rising from the dead to prolong the life of rubbish shows.
By stark contrast, Fuddy Meers brings us a major new American talent, though I wish the writer, David Lindsay-Abaire could have decided whether he was writing a heart-breaking tragi-comedy about amnesia or a manic farce. So in 90 short minutes we get both, often hopelessly jumbled. True, amnesia is a dodgy subject, especially for those of us getting a little absent-minded.
The stage designer Lez Brotherston has achieved some of the most brilliant set-changing devices I have ever seen. Angus Jackson's fluid production has a wondrous cast led by Julia McKenzie as a stroke-victim grandmother, weirdly accented somewhere half-way from Elaine Stritch to Ena Sharples.
Even the usually boring programme notes (in this case written by the playwright) contain the best Kevin Spacey joke I have yet read and, all in all, this is a very sick, very black comedy of considerable brilliance: Unsurprisingly, the author has already been picked up by Hollywood and is currently writing for Steven Spielberg. Hopefully there he will learn to separate Hellzapoppin farce from psychological comedy.
The Daily Telegraph Wednesday, May 26th 2004
Nuddin heah to laugh about
First Night - Charles Spencer
Fuddy Meers
ARTS THEATRE
THE posters for this off-Broadway import, the first show from Sam Mendes's new film and theatre production company Scamp, boast that it "puts the fun back into dysfunctional". Well, I suppose it depends on your idea of fun.
I giggled at first, but after two hours of punishing zaniness, laughter had long since curled up and died in my throat. Worse still, like so many New York shows, the piece goes all sentimental on us in the closing minutes. Yes, you can have a good politically incorrect laugh, the dramatist David Lindsay-Abaire seems to be saying, but I'm going to send you out of the theatre with a tear in your eye as well as a smile on your face.
British audiences, I fear, are made of less malleable stuff, and are more likely to spend the show's maudlin dying moments investigating the back of the seat in front to discover whether the management has thoughtfully provided a sick bag.
The play begins promisingly enough. Our heroine, Claire, wakes up, as she does every morning, to discover that she is suffering from total amnesia. She has no idea who she is and fails to recognise both her loving spouse and her teenage-monster of a son.
Patiently, her husband Richard explains her plight for the umpteenth time, and provides her with a folder with all the information she will need to get through the day. Claire, who has a naturally sunny disposition, accepts her situation with good grace, but can't help wondering whether her memory loss has been brought on by some repressed trauma.
You could imagine the piece turning into an interesting psychiatric case history, or even a thriller, but unfortunately the dramatist opts for ill-disciplined farce and cheap laughs. A lisping, limping man with terrible facial disfigurements crawls out from under Claire's bed, insists he's her brother and kidnaps her.
The loving husband - implausibly revealed as a reformed junkie - and his dope-smoking son set off in hot pursuit, hijacking a female cop en route, and everyone converges on the home of Claire's mother, who, after suffering a stroke, speaks in a strange nonsense language from which one gradually begins to discern the scrambled sense. It is she who provides the play's title when she says fuddy meers, meaning funny mirrors.
With guns going off, knife fights breaking out, lurid revelations of traumatic family abuse and the introduction of a yet another loony-tune character, who spends much of the evening in deeply unfunny dialogue with a tiresome glove puppet called Hinky Binky, the show becomes the kind of stuff of which nasty headaches are made.
We are obviously meant to find it terrifically liberating laughing at such screwed-up characters with their physical, mental and linguistic disabilities, but the play is nothing like funny or heartless enough. Joe Orton was managing this kind of thing far better 40 years ago.
The director, Angus Jackson, seems unable to decide whether we are meant to care about these dysfunctional characters, or regard them merely as comic cartoons, so he tries to have it both ways and falls flat on his face.
One can only salute the cast for so gamely struggling with such tosh. The American actress Katie Finneran has one or two touching moments as Claire, Nicholas Le Prevost some genuinely amusing ones as the uptight, upright husband who rediscovers the joys of dope.
But Tim Hopper never musters the required menace as the psychopathic villain of the piece and the great Julia McKenzie is entirely wasted as the stroke victim. "Nuddin fuddy heah," she remarks at one point, neatly providing the show with its own admirably concise obituary.
Evening Standard Wednesday, May 26th 2004
Forget this amnesiac
Fuddy Meers
Arts Theatre, WC2
Nicholas de Jongh
THE only virtue of David Lindsay-Abaire's aggressively boring farce about a victim of amnesia is its almost instant forgettability. The play vanishes in a puff of triviality. By the time you read this, I expect that I will no more remember Fuddy Meers than the play's heroine, Claire, can recollect what happened to her the day before.
Claire wakes each morning with her mental slate wiped clean, quite unaware she is married to Nicholas Le Prevost, who rouses her with the morning coffee.
Angus Jackson's heavy-handed production revels in futility and silliness, represented by Act One's climactic violence. The stage is alive with the sound and sight of variously disabled or dysfunctional people. Lindsay-Abaire appears to find such states of mind and body hilarious. Elderly Gertie, a stroke-victim who talks seeming gibberish, stabs a puppet. A young man with a puppet to hand sounds less than sane. A policewoman wrestles with a teenager for control of a gun. A man with a lisp and limp groans over his stab wounds. I could go on but shall not.
I fear, though, that Fuddy Meers, which Sam Mendes has unwisely chosen to launch his new production company, may be to the bad taste of some of our young in mind.
Two hundred productions have been seen since the play's 1999 premiere in New York. Fuddy Meers has been translated into several languages and is scheduled to become a motion picture. The play's own modest intention is to raise laughter by crudely depicting a world possessed by craziness and incoherence. Katie Finneran's serene Claire is snatched from her home by Tim Hopper's intense man with a limp and lisp, who wears a manacle and ski mask.
He whisks Claire away to the home of her mother, Gertie, whom poor Julia McKenzie valiantly represents in incoherent babbling. The play's mysteries are preposterously resolved. Athletic Matthew Lillard's ridiculous Millet, with large puppet always to hand, is immersed in this farcical nonsense, whose termination comes as a huge relief.
The Times Wednesday, May 26th 2004
Oddballs in need of an injection of wit
Theatre
Fuddy Meers
Arts, WC2
Benedict Nightingale
FUDDY MEERS is crazy-speak for funny mirrors. At any rate, those are the words that Julia McKenzie, playing an aged stroke-victim, uses when she remembers taking her son to the fairground. The problem is that they say more about David Lindsay-Abaire's oddball comedy than he might wish. Seeing it is like watching people mug and frolic in front of distorting mirrors, thinking themselves far funnier than they are.
In other words, the first stage production presented by Sam Mendes's new drama-and-movie company, Scamp, is a strenuously acted disappointment. I chortled a bit at McKenzie herself when, flopping about in a dowdy dressing gown, she earnestly spouted convoluted malapropisms as if they were sheer common sense: "ees med ah noose bah" instead of "these men are bad news" and so on. But yesterday's first-nighters laughed a lot less than the play's success off-Broadway must have led them to hope.
Actually, McKenzie's Gertie isn't the main character. That prize goes to Katie Finneran, the attractive American playing Claire, who wakes up and, as apparently happens every morning, doesn't know who she, her son or her husband are. She's suffering from "psychogenic amnesia", which is one reason she can't argue when a man in a ski mask appears from behind the marital bed, shakes the broken handcuffs dangling from his wrist, identifies himself as her brother, and carries her off to see her supposed mother, i.e., Gertie.
Self-conscious eccentricity is everywhere. Tim, Hopper, playing the escaped criminal who captures Claire, has one eye, one ear, a lisp and a deep hatred of bacon, and he's partnered by Matthew Lillard as a goofball who prefers to speak through a glove-puppet called Hinky Binky. And Nicholas Le Prevost is Claire's husband, a recovering druggie who interrupts his pursuit of her to kidnap a woman cop who questions his story that he's been ordered to smoke pot by a doctor who has no hands and so can't write prescriptions. So to a scene in which everyone seems to be yelling inanities and shooting or stabbing everyone else, including the poor, deranged puppet.
I have a taste for funny writers from Feydeau to Orton to Martin McDonagh, but, really, this piece needs a big injection of wit, point or something if it's to be rated as good farce or decent black comedy or a mix of both.
Nor did I find myself interested in the explanation for Claire's amnesia, which comes in due course, or manage to care as much about her fate as, astonishingly, Lindsay-Abaire seems to expect. I fear I can't do more for Angus Jackson's production than parody McKenzie's Gertie.
Sally toff dom. Damned silly stuff.
The Guardian Wednesday, May 26th 2004
Theatre
FuddyMeers
Arts Theatre, London
I have great regard for Sam Mendes. But just why his new production company SCAMP should kick off by importing this off-Broadway comedy by David Lindsay-Abaire remains a mystery: it's one of those untransportable American plays that, in rejecting social conformism and political correctness, ends up celebrating anything dysfunctional.
Everyone in the play has a problem. Its heroine, Claire, is suffering from stress-related amnesia. One day she is abducted by her supposed brother: a lisping, limping, facially scarred figure clearly on the run. He whisks Claire off to the rural home of her stroke-afflicted mother where they are joined by a whimsical fugitive whose chief companion is a manacled hand-puppet. With the arrival of Claire's husband and pothead son, the stage is set for the revelation of the real relationships and the cause of the heroine's trauma.
In part, the play is a throw-back to those period comedies such as Arsenic and Old Lace and You Can't Take It With You in which wackiness was a sign of liberating individualism. Lindsay-Abaire is also clearly reacting against the circumspect good taste of the Broadway disability-play. But, while all this may have resonance in America, it means little to us here. And when you compare the play with the work of a writer like Peter Nichols, who genuinely wrings pained laughter from domestic disaster, you realise how glibly mechanical Lindsay-Abaire's approach is.
Odd scenes spark a wry smile. In one, Claire's pursuing husband tries to impress his dope-smoking son by announcing: "I know the siren-call of ganja, Kenny." But the humour in the speech impediments of a stroke-victim, however well played by Julia McKenzie, passes me by. And, in its desperation to overturn suburban normality, the play comes close to suggesting that the damaged are privileged.
A hybrid Anglo-American cast does little to reconcile me to the play's strenuous reversal of accepted values, although Kate Finneran makes something touching out of Claire's amnesiac confusion and Nicholas Le Prevost is passably funny as her onetime druggie husband. But Angus Jackson's production strives over-hard to create an atmosphere of spiralling mayhem. And, in its jokily determined celebration of off-the-wall eccentricity, the play simply proves that too many kooks spoil the broth.
Michael Billington
The Independent Friday, May 28th 2004
Theatre
Fuddy Meers
Arts Theatre London
David Lindsay-Abaire's off-Broadway hit Fuddy Meers does not waste time tantalising you with the prospect that it might be any good. It focuses on a woman who is suffering from a strange form of amnesia. Every day she wakes up as a blank slate, wiped clean of any sense of prior identity. In the opening moments of Angus Jackson's strenuously upbeat production, we see Claire jerked into consciousness by an alarm clock. She doesn't think to switch it off and the noise goes on and on and, hey, we're evidently to assume that this broad has forgotten the entire concept of alarm clocks and wake-up calls. Which is odd, given that when the man who says he is her husband emerges with a cup of coffee, she has hardly any problem coping with the idea of "cup" or "coffee" or the handling of same.
Despite a very game performance from Katie Finneran, Claire is not a character we are invited to construe with any care. Hers is, after all, a deeply distressing and disorienting plight. As constructed by this dramatist, she is upset only to a degree that is consistent with her function as a synaptically challenged variant of the ditzy, dumb blonde.
There's certainly much dramatic potential in a situation that leaves the heroine at the mercy of a posse of pretenders who claim to be her nearest and dearest. A playwright could have a field day with an explosion of competing versions of reality. But Lindsay-Abaire blows it by trying too hard.
The ads claim that the piece puts the "fun in dysfunctional" but everything is so shrilly wacky that it ends up merely putting the "sub" in "insubstantial". Claire, for example, is a positive magnet for misfits. There's a half-blind, half-deaf guy (Tim Hopper) who says he is her brother. There's a stroke-impaired slattern (Julia McKenzie), who talks in odiously audience-friendly stroke-speak and may or may not he her mother. And there's a weirdo (Matthew Lillard) who can only communicate what may be truths through a foul-mouthed glove puppet.
The comedy ignites in one odd sequence, largely thanks to Nicholas Le Prevost, playing a hilarious criminal recidivist who would love to go straight but whose life "shows ya that stability is a fragile figurine", and John Gallagher Jnr as his alleged son. The scenes where they dementedly drive away with a kidnapped female cop are a high point.
The play fatally lacks the kind of integrity exhibited in Christopher Nolan's movie Memento, where theme and style are brilliantly fused. Fuddy Meers illustrates an amnesia which makes British producers forget that what works off-Broadway does not necessarily tickle the funny bone of London theatregoers. This piece is co-produced by SCAMP, Sam Mendes's new independent film and theatre production company. It is not an auspicious beginning.
PAUL TAYLOR
Sunday Times Sunday, May 30th 2004
Freaks like us
It's an un-PC comedy of physical tics, but Fuddy Meers has a message for us all, says VICTORIA SEGAL
"No hugging, no learning.' That was the maxim that guided the creators of Seinfeld, a rule designed to avoid the sentimental softness that can neuter comedy more quickly than a shot of bromide - the M*A*S*H moment, where free-falling hilarity is suddenly interrupted by a homily on war. For those who are not friends of Friends, comedy is best undiluted by the milk of human kindness, a misanthropy espresso with a proper kick - the chance to feel better about human nature at its worst.
Fuddy Meers, David Lindsay-Abaire's play at the Arts Theatre, initially looks like a truly black-hearted comedy, a carnival of dysfunction that has a cheerful pop at speech impediments, mental illness and physical disability. Its disregard for political correctness didn't stop it from becoming an off-Broadway hit, and this staging, directed by Angus Jackson, partly comes courtesy of Sam Mendes's production company, Scamp. Forget elegant, American Beauty-style alienation: this is a play infested by tics, glutted with grotesquerie, like a flea after a feed. It even stars a horrible puppet called Hinky Binky. At times, it's like taking a wrong turn and ending up down the seedy end of Sesame Street; at others, it's like watching the Farrelly Brothers writing their very own Festen. Rum and rummer.
It should be over-the-top, mall-rat, "gross-out" humour, yet behind the freak-show razzle-dazzle, the play manages some surprisingly, sweet sentiments. Claire (Katie Finneran) suffers from psychogenic amnesia. Every morning, she wakes not knowing who or where she is: she has to be reintroduced to her patient husband, Richard (Nicholas Le Prevost), and her dyslexic teenage stoner son, Kenny (the impressively stroppy John Gallagher Jr). One morning, this routine is shattered by a masked, limping man with a lisp (Tim Hopper), who springs out from behind her bed claiming to be her brother. He says he has come to rescue her from an abusive marriage and drives her to see her mother, Gertie (Julia McKenzie), who is unable to speak properly after a stroke. The unease is amplified by the appearance of Millet (Matthew Lillard), a volatile loser who wears the remains of manacles on one hand and a foul-mouthed glove puppet on the other. As husband and son search for Claire, the apparently strait-laced Richard explodes in a burst of reefer madness, kidnapping a policewoman (Charlotte Randle). When these two groups collide, it's the greatest Jerry Springer Show on earth.
Any amnesia drama explores constructs of reality and identity, and while Fuddy Meers raises those questions, it raises the stakes by similarly disorientating the audience. Like Claire or Gertie, they, are left with bits missing, as Lindsay-Abaire cleverly withholds the information needed to make the correct connections. Yet these puzzle-piece characters are animated by the firecracker energy of the writing and the performances. Finneran is poignant as the blank-space Claire, obsessed with word-search puzzles, yet unable to remember what happened yesterday. Hopper gives his ruined character a nasty edge - his lisp mercilessly exploited for comic potential, his potential for danger never ignored. Lillard has a natural comic energy, in a too-small suit with the security tags still hanging off the legs. Millet is a victim of childhood abuse, and his interaction with the alarming Hinky Binky is profoundly disturbing. This puppet is reminiscent of dolls given to children in therapy, and similarly says the unsayable.
And the unsayable is at the heart of this play. The limping man's lisp, Claire's confusion, Gertie's stroke-induced aphasia - all conspire against clarity and
truth. McKenzie's performance matches her dialogue for technical virtuosity, her word-mangling effortlessly rendered. "That's an understatement" becomes "Dashen dunder-n-tince-tate"; "Hoe-down-do-sicken" is "Hold on a second". "Fuddy meers" are the funny mirrors of the fairground, distorting glasses that twist and change. Besides the characters' exaggerated physical flaws, the playwright also warps language and plot until you are watching a play that, like a thin man reflected fat, rejects normal logic. What has so happened to Claire to make her lose her memory? Why does the limping man limp? What makes Richard so wary of policemen?
Gradually matters clarify, but it's like being blindfolded, spun around and told to pin the donkey on the tail. Lez Brotherston's set, too, shifts startlingly: Claire's bed becomes a car; the kitchen becomes a cellar. This play is like one of Claire's word-search puzzles - a jumble of manias and afflictions that ultimately reveals a simple heart. Love's redemptive power gets a look-in, as does the dream of forging a family out of white-hot dysfunction. The sick humour heals, mellowing into wistfulness. It's almost like a Hallmark greeting card, but one with the poem printed backwards and upside down. Learning from Fuddy Meers is one thing - hugging it just seems foolish.
Fuddy Meers
Arts Theatre, WC1
The Observer Sunday, May 30th 2004
Susannah Clapp
Fuddy Meers
Arts Theatre, London WC2
This galumphing farce has had over 200 productions since it opened four years ago at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and a film is now in preparation. It's hard to see why. And hard to understand why something so second-rate was chosen to launch Sam Mendes's new film and theatre production company.
David Lindsay-Abaire's play, directed with unrelenting hilarity by Angus Jackson, bunches together a man with a really bad lisp, a simple bloke who speaks out through a foul-mouthed puppet, an amnesiac who pieces together her life anew each morning, and her mother who has had a stroke and whose words come out jumbled.
The aim may be to give the audience a laugh while casting a new light on normality: much as the funny mirrors ("fuddy meers" in stroke speak) do in a fair-ground. Even with a strong cast - including Nicholas Le Prevost and Julia McKenzie - it doesn't work. It's not fresh. And it's not fuddy.
The Sunday Telegraph Sunday, May 30th 2004
Theatre
John Goss
Fuddy Meers is a mysterious title, but it is by no means the most mysterious thing about David Lindsay-Abaire's play at the Arts Theatre. A bigger puzzle is why Sam Mendes should have chosen the piece to launch his new production company. An even bigger one is, what's the point of it all?
Claire is an American housewife who suffers from recurrent bouts of amnesia. One day she is abducted by a sinister character with a lisp, a limp, a missing car and a phobia about bacon: a weirdo who communicates through a glove puppet is in attendance. Claire's husband Richard sets off in pursuit but reverts to his junkie past and kidnaps a policewoman. Claire's mother, who has had a stroke, speaks in a semi-intelligible babble, of which "fuddy meers" is an example: it means "funny mirrors".
Katie Finneran makes an attractive Claire, Nicholas Le Prevost raises a few smiles as Richard, Julia McKenzie does her valiant best as Claire's mother. But the play itself simply lurches from one piece of uninspired zaniness to the next. It's a convincing demonstration that fuddy peculiar doesn't necessarily equal fuddy ha-ha.
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