Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore in You’ve Got Hate Mail (Mellow Drama at St James Cavalier) have come up with a familiar sex comedy plot about an unfaithful husband and his lustful and greedy mistress; his unsuspecting wife who gets to know about her husband’s misdeeds from her shocked but also envious best friend; and the husband’s good-natured best male friend who tries unwisely to save his friend’s marriage and ends up giving it a coup de grace instead.
They make it amusing by making all the events transpire from a long series of e-mails and mobile phone-calls and messages sent by the five characters.
The set designer has little to worry about providing a set for this farcical comedy. All the audience sees is two rows of characters keying in messages or receiving them at their individual laptops, and much of the acting is confined to what the generally seated characters say as they key in their messages or react to what they have received.
As one can expect of a contemporary sex comedy, the dialogue is larded with four-letter words, sexual innuendos and even the occasional graphic description of a sensual activity that is desired or has actually been accomplished, but there is never any physical contact between the characters, for the only contact between the characters we are allowed to see is a cybernetic one.
Many in the audience were laughing gaily at the mishaps and occasional triumphs of the characters, but the greatest guffaws accompanied the difficulties, known to all habitual users of e-mail, sometimes met in e-mailing.
The most fearful mishap is when an e-mail is sent carelessly to the wrong addressee, especially when the message is of a risqué nature, and, in fact, this is what happens to the play’s errant husband, Richard (John Montanaro) at the beginning of the play, when a sizzling e-mail destined for his sensual and easily offended mistress Wanda (Pia Zammit) goes in error to his quiet and unsuspecting wife, Stephanie (Jo Caruana) who then forwards it to her friend Peg (Julia Calvert).
Peg not only puts Stephanie right about what is happening, but maliciously sends e-mails full of insults to Wanda, purportedly from Richard. Most of the plot consists of variations on this ploy.
The plot begins to thicken when George (Wesley Ellul) tries to help Stephanie and Richard and manages to make things worse. The plot takes a new course when Stephanie and Richard start going to a marriage counsellor (not a character in the comedy) but when things begin to look up for the marriage, things go astray again, even though Richard desires a full reconciliation.
The playwrights then speed things up by arranging for Richard to have a bad car accident, and he is the only one to suffer an unhappy ending, for the other four all manage to find happiness, two of them in an utterly unexpected way. Not a great plot, but one meant to delight those playgoers who eagerly look for more of the same.
The director of this play does not have the hardest of jobs, so long as he has a good cast experienced in the timing of comic dialogue and able to act mainly through changing facial expressions.
James Calvert has certainly found himself a good cast able to keep the production moving at a fine pace, all able to suggest the different personalities that lie behind the five frantic e-mailers.
Montanaro starts off too explosively as Richard but wisely settles for a little more restraint very soon.
Though he handles the sex-laden communications meant for Wanda with lubricious delight, he is at his subtlest as he is faced with the impending loss of his gentle wife, always faithful until she decides to pay Richard back in his own coin.
I thought the director could have made the admittedly tricky moment of Richard’s car accident a tad more convincing.
Caruana is a sweet Stephanie, one of those very good wives for whom their husband’s infidelity comes as a very great shock, but her realisation that Richard is a husband she should ditch makes us see there is a steely core in her.
As Wanda, Zammit brings out all the coarseness, verbal and psychological, of this money-grabbing woman. I find it a pity she is given a happy ending of some sort.
Julia Calvert sharply characterises Peg as the kind of friend whose care is inextricably tied up with envy of that apparently more fortunate person. She is unattractive and knows it, so her anonymous persecution of Wanda gives her a kick, sadistic perhaps, and subsequently her fling with George, though short-lived, encourages her to take yet another step, more daring and, the audience probably thinks, much more likely to succeed.
Ellul’s George begins quietly but develops into the sort of funny character who blunders through life until he finds, to his surprise, that he has brought something great off.
His intellectual shortcomings are often decried and his sexual obsession with Hillary Clinton is hilarious, but we know he is a good man and we wish him luck at the end.