Reviews - (Date: August 1, 2004) Jamaica Observer
by Norman Rae

"THE LAST STAND" - A REVIEW

Patrick Brown, whose The Last Stand is now running at CentreStage, is an interesting playwright to watch. His problem seems to me to be the demands of the production group of which he is a part and which requires a boffo hit every time in order to keep the auditorium packed to the rafters with customers rolling in the aisles (if they can indeed do that when packed to the rafters!). There is nothing wrong whatsoever with having a box-office ringer every time but it does mean that a play dealing with serious themes seriously - NOT dully - is going to have a hell of a time emerging.

I feel this tension in the new offering which seems really in that line of country which the French call grand guignol. The theatre in Paris, which specialised in this genre, built quite a reputation and had powerful influence on playwrights of the mid-20th Century and on literary movements like the Theatre of Cruelty.

Essentially, Guignol specialised in creepy-crawly pieces in which the characters were in danger from supernatural forces or very real villains, the emphasis being on the horrors conjured up and the shivers up and down the audience's spine.

Although many a scorned lady would love to, it is after all macabre enough that a group of discarded mistresses should conspire to revenge themselves on their faithless lover by chopping off his. how shall I put this delicately? Ah. Once some 30 or so years ago, Ed Wallace presented Operation P for which the promo was "what happens when a man loses his closest buddy".

Woody (Glen Campbell) is indeed a faithless lover (he keeps a diary in which his conquests are recorded and rated; he has reached near 500). He's so busy he can't remember his wife's birthday, much less that he's married. Unfortunately, one of his more spirited lovers that was, takes to furnishing her apartment with samples of instruments from medieval torture chambers (ordered from E-Bay I guess) one of which happens to be the buddy-separator.

The play would seem to want every now and then to look truthfully at problems of promiscuity, inadequacy, love, sexuality or, failing that, to present a rattlingly good 'mellerdrammer'. No doubt, with an eye on the "CentreStage vehicle", director Trevor Nairne allows the production to do more than just tip over - to take a running hop, skip and jump into a pit of vulgarity. The object is achieved. The audience cackle is high decibel - once it has managed to put its cell phones away. There are some very loud laughs indeed, most of them triggered by the very vulgarness. Deon Silvera throwing caution to the winds and successfully batting sixes throughout the evening, and Christopher Hutchinson, playing over the top also - as a transvestite who turns up in the diary on par with the rest, get most of them. Silvera is quite hilarious in the scene where they've strapped Woody to the guillotine-like device. She launches into a series of frenzied dancehall routines that would grace Pier One as she tries to induce something for the cutting device to cut.

The dialogue returns every now and then to the theme that men are 'dawgs'! Yes, screams Mr Hutchinson on one occasion, bringing the house down: "That's why I switch!"

In all of this, Glen Campbell (Woody) remains chained to the bedstead which is probably why he indulges in a permanent eyes-wide-and-rolling aspect. Donisha Prendergast and Camile Davis round out the company of five.