Watching Four Dogs And A Bone at the Old Fitz is kind of like watching Bugsy Malone,that old Jodie Foster movie set in Chicago in 1929. All the gangsters and all the molls are children, led by Foster herself, and it’s all played with a straight face.
John Patrick Shanley’s play is interested in another kind of underworld: the movie business. The titular four dogs consist of two actresses (at each other’s throats, obviously), a producer suffering from a canker on his arse (which he describes with vivid articulacy) and the writer, a playwright making his first movie who’s sleeping with one of the actresses (of course). It’s all pretty broad stuff, and Kate Gaul’s production is happy to double down on the stonking lack of subtlety.
Shanley’s play premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1993, starring a young Mary-Louise Parker, and it won raves. It’s hard to tell why it now feels so passé, though maybe it’s because we’re all so saturated in behind-the-scenes bumf about the movies. Not to mention Entourage. Then again, maybe it’s just this production. The problem with it is similar to that which bedeviled the STC’s production of Loot a few years ago, featuring a then-unheralded Josh McConville. McConville was one of the few who emerged unscathed. Farce like this – all rat-a-tat zingers in a very specific patois – is unforgiving. You either nail it or the whole thing’s a bust.
In this production, the actors all speak cartoon-American – a mash up of noir inflections and booming Harvey Weinstein mogul-speak overlaid with the aggressive vitality of Californian organic café dwellers – but it all feels terribly affected, and the timing is way off. The actors don’t listen to each other, which inevitably leads to the pre-empting of cues, killing more than one punchline stone dead. This production isn’t subversive or titillating; it’s just too obvious by half.
1.5/5 stars
Four Dogs And A Bone was reviewed at the Old Fitzroy Theatre on Thursday September 18.
