Farce is not normally Unifaun’s favourite genre. So perhaps it was Fo’s celebrity as a left-wing author that drew Adrian Buckle in the first place to perform Double Fo, in English versions, in addition to the attraction of a production that would get sizeable audiences to the Manoel Theatre.
The Virtuous Burglar and Marcolfa are brilliant one-acters relying on similar techniques. The former is a clever work that depends on the increasingly frenzied activity that develops when three couples trying to engage in adulterous relations are thrown together as a result of a thieving expedition gone wrong.
The Burglar (Philip Stilon) has a bossy and very inquisitive wife (Magda van Kuilenburg), who rings him up as he is carrying out the burglary, ruining all his timing. He is forced to hide inside, of all places, a large grandfather clock, when the Man who owns the house (Mikhail Basmadjian) unexpectedly comes in with the Woman he is desperately trying to bed (Coryse Borg).
Basmadjian’s performance deserves close study both by students and by practising professionals
Then in comes Anna, the Man’s wife (Charlotte Grech), who is fobbed off with an improvised story about the Burglar and the Woman being husband and wife.
Things come to a head, however, when the Burglar’s wife walks in, followed by yet another husband who is also a lover (Alan Paris).
Both in this farce and in Marcolfa, fire-arms are used with comic effect, and the grandfather clock in which the burglar and others take refuge from time to time finds a parallel in Marcolfa, where a roomy wardrobe provides a refuge again and again.
Fo is quite skilled in providing endings with a double twist, more spectacularly in Marcolfa. The latter play, which is set in the 1840s, has a plot centred round the character in the title part. This character is female, but in this production is played by a man (Paris), as it had been in the original Italian production.
Paris’s character is the middle-aged governess of the debt-ridden Marchese di Trerate (Edward Mercieca). She is a good person who has never been considered as a marriageable woman by any man, save by the humble and insignificant Francesco (Renato Dimech), until it becomes known she has a winning lottery ticket that will bring her into a great sum.
She now finds herself, initially to her bewilderment but ultimately to her delight, courted by the Marchese’s principal creditor Giuseppe (Basmadjian).
She is also suddenly courted by the Marchese himself, not realising (this is farce, after all) that they are both after her newly-acquired money.
Chris Gatt directs two fine casts with a good eye for the ever-increasingly rapid rhythm of the two farces and for the detail, both psychological and physical, of the main comic episodes in the two plots.
Both pieces have a kingpin of outstanding ability: Basmadjian’s Man in the first and Paris’s Marcolfa in the second. Basmadjian’s Man is what every farce needs to have: a person who finds himself in a very precarious situation and is clearly agonised by his inability to get out of it.
The main thing, of course, is that his agony is not the dark one of drama but the excruciatingly funny one of farce. Basmadjian’s performance is three-dimensional and keeps on developing. It deserves close study both by students and by practising professionals. This actor acquires a different persona as Giuseppe in the other piece, also doing well in it.
Paris, unrecognisable in his female wig and a hooked nose, also manages the feat of being a woman with recognisably womanly gestures and movements without ever playing for laughs.
He achieves what Fo certainly had in mind, that of being a victim in a man’s world, saved by the man who is the only one who loves her.
Dimech as Francesco makes the leap from the nondescript man of his first entrance to the comic hero of the last part of the piece. Mercieca, a veteran of comedy and farce, brings out the overweening selfishness of the Marchese. He looks absurd when he thinks he is impressive in his scarlet uniform and he truly deserves his come-uppance at the end.
Stilon’s Burglar in the first play is a comical mixture of submissive husband, proud professional and stereotypic Italian when he seizes his opportunity to have a fling with Borg’s sexually-charged Woman in her mini-dress.
But he calms down when his wife (a comically aggressive Van Kuilenburg) enters the scene. In the second piece, Borg keeps the Principessa’s sexuality under control, stressing her superciliousness instead.
Grech, an elegant and superior Anna in the first piece and a furious, gun-toting Teresa in the second, keeps both pieces moving fast at crucial moments, leading to climaxes in the plot.