PLAYWRIGHT Joseph Kesselring won fame for his black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. But it could so easily have joined the rest of his oeuvre to languish in obscurity without the timely advice of a friend who, after reading a draft of the script, persua
ded the former school teacher of the play's richly comic potential.
Kesselring had originally conceived of the work as a heavyweight melodrama but wisely taking his friend's insight on board, he changed tack and the play opened as a comedy in New York in 1941 to widespread critical and commercial acclaim. The blackly comic farce, which plots the mishaps of theatre critic Mortimer Brewster presenting his newly betrothed love Elaine to his two elderly aunts at their Brooklyn boarding house, was immortalised in a 1944 Frank Capra film starring Cary Grant.
The laughs in this latest revival from veteran amateur company the Edinburgh People's Theatre at The Churchill Theatre come thick and fast as Mortimer, played with assurance by Will MacIver, begins to uncover the outwardly mild spinsters' ghoulish taste for poisoning their bachelor lodgers.
The two murderous aunts are characterised with beautifully sinister insouciance by Sheila Somerville as Abby Brewster and Valerie Lennie as Martha Brewster, admitting to their nephew that the elderberry wine they serve their singleton guests as an aperitif has some extra ingredients, namely, "arsenic, strychnine and just a pinch of cyanide".
The surreal tension between this theatre-hating, drama critic and his mass murdering but mild-mannered aunts is pricked to laugh-out-loud effect by the madcap antics of Mortimer's eccentric elder brother Teddy, whose bizarre obsession with Theodore Roosevelt is portrayed with obvious relish by Ronnie Millar.
Each time Teddy mounts the stairs he relives Roosevelt's famous assault at the head of his Rough Rider irregulars at the Battle of San Juan Hil. Further convinced that the basement is in fact Panama, his excavations to create locks for the famous canal are opportunistically redeployed by his genteel yet deadly aunts as a handy means of disposing of the gruesome remains of their mounting body count with Teddy believing he is burying yellow fever victims.
The situation is further complicated by the arrival of Mortimer's murderous gangster brother Jonathan, his alcoholic plastic surgeon Dr Einstein and yet another murder victim in tow. Mortimer's increasingly frantic attempts to both alert the bumbling local police to the very real threat his gangster brother poses, avert the threat of his aunts imminent arrest by having them and his eccentric but essentially harmless brother Jonathan committed to the insane asylum, while concealing the ghoulish excesses of his mad family from his unsuspecting fiancée, are naturally thwarted.
Director Iain Fraser paces his competent amateur cast deftly, with the tension building right until the denouement's revelation that our hero Mortimer isn't related by blood to this family of lunatics and can marry his sweetheart with a guilt-free conscience.
A pedigree of successful productions dating back more than 60 years is fitting testament to the quality of drama on offer here.
The full article contains 518 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
