[2013059] Raton Laveur
Fairly Lucid Productions @ Bakehouse Theatre – Main Stage
7:30pm, Mon 25 Feb 2013
Walking into the Main Stage at the Bakehouse, the light crowd saw a lounge room. Just an ordinary, urban lounge room; nothing unremarkable, nothing untoward. We sat down; the house lights dropped. In the darkness, we hear a quiet rustling… and then a desperate whimpering. The house lights come up, and the ordinary scene has gone; in the centre of the room is a rolled up carpet. Standing over it is a man holding a baseball bat and hyperventilating – the source of the whimpering. And there’s blood… lots of blood. The carpet, clearly rolled around a lump of something, is caked in the stuff, and the man is liberally covered in red stains.
It’s a bloodbath.
It’s also an incredibly effective opening.
The man – Phil – has become obsessed with the nest of raccoons that lives behind the crêperie in which he works; his fiancé, Lily, is the cooler head in this situation, and gently pries him for information. The lump in the rolled carpet is the Raccoon King, we are told; but Phil is clearly paranoid and delusional – and constantly gasping for breath – and, as they contemplate the cleanup of the blood and the carcass (including a fantastic bit of desperate back-and-forth banter about how to cut through bone), it soon becomes evident that Phil and Lily don’t have the most stable of relationships.
Curiously, the somewhat predictable Big Twist is revealed about a third of the way through the play; the remainder of the play is a gore-tinted exploration of the co-dependency of the couple’s relationship. This is neatly contrasted to the bizarre Raccoon King thread, and reveals a depth to the script that really satisfies. But the script also delivers a whole lot of What-The-Fuck moments, too, and they continue to delight throughout.
Wendy Bos is incredibly good as the cool-under-pressure Lily, and I’m staggered as to how Ben Noble could hyperventilate (or at least sound like he was hyperventilating) for so long; his mania is writ large on his face. The two actors are good enough to flatten out the few lumps in the script (the fact that Phil and Lily are together at all becomes more and more implausible as the play progresses), and their comic timing is superb.
And it’s worth pointing out that Raton Laveur is, indeed, a comedy… just a very, very, black comedy. Not only that, but it’s also very, very, entertaining; another one of those productions that makes me utterly thankful that the Fringe exists. And that opening… just superb.