The Stage

Factors Unforeseen - A La Renverse

Published Tuesday 5 May 2009 at 13:40 by John Thaxter

Michel Vinaver’s plays, with their lack of punctuation, stage directions and dramatic development, create great challenges for directors and actors, but the problem is more acute for audiences struggling to follow his dialogue sliced into crosscut fragments.

The action is usually given an industrial setting and A La Renverse, written in 1979, is no exception. It features a cast of more than 20 actors playing the executives and staff of a French cosmetic company, selling a popular suntan lotion that goes into free-fall when a royal beauty is regularly interviewed on television about her skin cancer.

With so many characters, I found it hard going, like the first day in a new job when office personalities and politics swamp one’s senses. Indeed, I never quite came to grips with the ‘suits’ who run the company in a constant state of panic until a staff buy-out halts the slide.

But the female line-up dazzles with style, wit and crisp characterisation, led by Emma Gregory as the firm’s ideas woman and Amber Agar in several clearly differentiated roles, including a market researcher and the chief’s Girl Friday.

Lisa Stevenson gives a spirited portrayal of the trade union delegate with more sense than the management, Jemma Churchill cuts a strong figure as a senior manager, while Amy Neilson Smith and Sarah Lam amusingly knit and chinwag their way through a defining workers’ sit-in strike.

The key role, of course, is the princess, coping with cancer while maintaining her aristocratic beauty, superbly supplied by Rebecca Egan, whose poise and profile are set off by couture clothes and a silk scarf tied closely to her head as a poignant dramatic focus.