The success of stage director Victoria Rae Sook’s production of “The Mystery of Irma Vep” at Bristol Riverside Theatre is her ability to marry farce and camp with the real enough to make Charles Ludlam’s play funny while keeping it suspenseful.
Counterintuitively, farce works best when it is played straight. Characters, after all, are not living their lives in a comedy. They are not necessarily trying to be funny and do not usually know they are funny. The comedy comes from how the audience views those lives. Sook maintains a delicate balance between the intentionally outrageous parody and the psychological thriller so that Bristol’s “Irma Vep” earns legitimate laughs while keeping you genuinely curious about what is causing mayhem on the British moors and who exactly is behind it. She is aided by another handsome, versatile set by Jason Simms, who like Sook, blends wit with the realistic, and contrapuntal performances by two actors who play all half-dozen roles in “Irma Vep,” Chris French and Charles Osborne.
French, even when he does drag, plays the more conventional characters. Along with Sook and Simms, he has a sure sense of when to play unaffected and when to go a tad over the top. Osborne reveals more in the outlandish, eccentric traits of his characters. He flounces and twirls and bats eyelashes. Yet when called to do so, he can be chilling and even threatening.
Sook, French, Osborne, Simms, and other designers combine to make Bristol’s “Irma Vep” a good time with sci-fi dividends. Together, they establish a tone that is at once amusing and Gothic bordering on Grand Guignol.
Charles Ludlam, as an actor and an author, liked to dwell in what he termed “The Ridiculous.” In “Irma Vep,” his most produced work, he borrows liberally from Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Hound of the Baskervilles, and Edgar Allan Poe in general, while paying homage to old movies and the heroines that populated them. He peppers those derivatives with his own imagination and knack for the sharp or droll one-liner, so “Irma Vep” entertains in a way that both lampoons the known while retaining some traits that made “Rebecca,” etc. popular and memorable.
He sets “Irma Vep” in an old, isolated, British estate called Mandercrest. Like Du Maurier’s Manderley in “Rebecca,” it houses a wealthy noble’s new bride while surrounding her with the meticulously preserved trappings of the noble’s late wife who died horrifically in an unpleasant encounter on the moors. The setting and characters are perfect for a story with supernatural overtones, a story Ludlam brought to vibrant life and that Sook and company tell well.
Because “Irma Vep” by design involves two actors playing several parts, the quick changes between scenes because part of the show’s comic fabric. Osborne has a magnificent scene in which he plays a Mandercrest caretaker and jack of all trades fighting off the tough and distinct traits of his unwanted alter ego, one, let’s say, that appears how matter much one resists at the full moon.
“Irma Vep” is an anagram, and you can guess Osborne’s character’s anomaly from what I say about the full moon, so there are traces of classic horror movies among the show’s ample melodrama.
Bristol Riverside bills “The Mystery of Irma Vep” as a penny dreadful, so it comes to its horror and melodrama honestly. A penny dreadful at one point was a newspaper or magazine that stressed the strange in human life, including the supernatural. The penny dreadful built and enhanced stories around murderers like Jack the Ripper and would certainly be an outlet for a tale about a second wife that can never get past the shadow and memory of her predecessor, especially as one character is on a mission to keep about the first wife alive and well-cared for. Sook’s production lives up to the penny dreadful’s reputation, with laughs as a bonus.
Charles Osborne, as the second mistress of Mandercrest, and the caretaker who fights his own unwanted state, is the showier of “Irma Vep’s” two performers, but it is Chris French in his roles as the stiff-upper-lip lord of Mandercrest and its long-time Mrs. Danvers-like housekeeper that gives Sook’s production its stability and keeps it as interesting as it is amusing.
In both of his important characters, French remains dignified and typical of his class amid the comic absurdity around him. French is particularly good at keeping the housekeeper, Jane, seem prim, haughty, and moralistic while she is insidiously undermining the comfort of her new mistress. French lets Ludlam’s lines and their inherent double entendre irony do the work while he keeps a straight face and proceeds as if his characters stood for the normal and rational. He aids Ludlam’s spoof of the English country squire by being more straightforward than outlandish. His speech and movements are heightened but in a way that is more in keeping with Victorian melodrama — i.e., the penny dreadful — than in pushing comedy that doesn’t need help to register.
Osborne is a born showman, a contrast to French’s relative propriety and control. Luckily, he’s so good as caricature and has such a good time creating it, he can be funny without undercutting the sinister parts of “Irma Vep.”
While French’s Jane has spinsterish mannerisms and talks about respectability and standards to be upheld, Osborne’s less pretentious caretaker, Nicodemus, is all leers, arched eyebrows, sly smiles, and subterfuge. Osborne hints there’s more to Nicodemus than meets the eye. His gift is being appropriately hilarious while being able to convey both Nicodemus’s troubling traits and his personal struggle to resist them. Again, I think of an instance in which Osborne and Sook use an open doorway to show Osborne battling with his fully seen right arm against a metamorphosizing left arm that indicates transition and danger. This instance stands out because it’s both rollicking and terrifying.
Osborne is more realistic, though in a camp Lady Bracknell way, as Enid, the distressed second mistress of Mandercrest. Capitalizing on Enid being an actress, Osborne gives her dramatic entrances and exaggerated habits. His Enid never walks directly from one side of the room to another. En route, she curtsies, fans out the ample skirts of her dress, and does waltzlike turns, first left, then right, if not full twirls, as if Enid is seeking the attention of an audience. Which, in fact, Osborne does.
French and Osborne are both, by necessity master of the quick change — one wig on, another off; gown doffed to reveal a man’s suit or workman’s overalls. Sook at times breaks the fourth wall by having one or another of the actors run madly from one side of the stage to the other to make his next entrance on cue.
Everything Sook and the actors do adds up to fun. I have some cavils with line readings that miss a Ludlam joke in the choice of word emphasis, but in general, French and Osborne have found and take advantage of every nuance.
One other cavil: there are two prop items that “Irma Vep’s” scripts purport to represent Enid. At Bristol, neither of these items, a dummy and a mummy, come near to looking like the Enid we see. The difference might have been meant as a joke, but it drew no laughs on opening night.
Jason Simms masterfully constructs an English country drawing room that smacks of tradition and murder mystery. His rendition of an Egyptian tomb is no less remarkable. Linda B. Stockton’s costumes matched the production is being right for the period yet humorous. Conor Mulligan’s lighting and Ryk Lewis’s sound design were excellent, one emphasizing Mandercrest’s nefarious tone, the other providing the scary sounds of the moor.
The Mystery of Irma Vep, Bristol Riverside Theatre, 120 Radcliffe Street, Bristol, PA. Through Sunday, October 22, Wednesday and Thursday, 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., Wednesday and Saturday, 2 p.m., and Sunday, 3 p.m. $50 to $60. 215-785-0100 or www.brtstage.org.
