Theatre
You’ve Got Hate Mail
St James Cavalier
Contemporary confusion with all things technological is often considered the bane of baby boomers, but there are many who find that net weaves a world wide web of confusion in their lives. It can lure you, trap you and altogether mess your life up especially if a typo or an erroneous slip of the enter button sends your most private of messages spiralling out into cyberspace towards the wrong recipient. This is exactly what happens in Mellow Drama’s latest production, You’ve Got Hate Mail, currently running at St James Cavalier. Forget about videotapes – according to what the tagline says this is all about sex, lies and laptops.
Oh yes, we’ve left the analogue age and entered the digital one for good, with smartphones and notebooks becoming a permanent extension of our lives and our lifestyle. When your recently retired mother complains about internet speed while she’s googling, you know there’s no turning back.
You’ve Got Hate Mail has been dubbed by Mellow Drama as “a comedy of errors for the broadband generation” and it certainly is. Told entirely via e-mails, and text messages, albeit spoken, the concept of the play is not entirely new, but Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore’s brilliant script is a gem of quick, off-the-bat one-liners which manage to crack you up for almost the entire run of the show. With witty asides and sexual banter aplenty, the play pokes fun at our indispensable new means of communication, abbreviations, attachments, loss of tone, inflection and the subsequent use of emoticons, all the while using a tried and tested theme which is certain to cause mayhem – adultery and over-enthusiastic vocalisation of the how when and where.
So what exactly happens when the raunchy e-mail you meant exclusively for the fourth floor receptionist you’re having an affair with, accidentally gets sent to your wife instead? A wife moreover, whose trust is inversely proportional to her lack of internet savvy and who forwards the confusing e-mail to her well-meaning but meddlesome best friend? Factor in your kind but bumbling workmate who is more willing to help everybody out and you’ve got yourself into a pixellated pickle.
John Montanaro plays straying husband Richard who cannot keep his mouse in its place long enough to realise that Pia Zammit’s receptionist Wanda is as fishy as her namesake. Jo Caruana’s unsuspecting and loving housewife Stephanie becomes increasingly desperate after her friend Peg, played by Julia Calvert, infiltrates Richard and Wanda’s conversation, follows them to their sleazy rendezvous, and presents Stephanie with some incriminating m“peg”s of the salacious tryst. In the meantime, Richard’s friend and colleague, the bumbling but sweet George, portrayed by Wesley Ellul, tries to keep everyone happy while managing to get himself unwitting in the line of fire.
A crucial factor in this performance is that it is conducted almost entirely with the cast seated at coffee-shop style stools and tables, involving very little physical movement of the conventional kind in terms of staging. But far from being static, the entire performance is based on the fast-paced, madcap script and excellent comic timing that the entire cast has. Their incredibly strong dynamic is as much a culmination of their professionalism as it is attributable to James Calvert’s excellent direction – the combination of the two kept the flow of the piece fluid, sharp and captivating. All five actors exposed their mastery of some of the most important aspects of their craft – the modulation of voice, tone, facial expression and upper body movement, hardly ever getting off their seats to do so. The success of the piece depended heavily on the cast’s ability to create distinct characters and mould them around accepted character types and this was where they excelled.
Ms Zammit’s raunchy and manipulative Wanda complimented Mr Montanaro’s scheming, lying, cheating scoundrel Richard creating a duo which makes the Strauss-Kahn saga rather PG; while Ms Calvert took the role of shrewish and protective best friend to a whole new level, crossing keyboards with everybody and willing to show George her motherboard. Mr Ellul’s George couldn’t be more accommodating and Ms Caruana’s Stephanie transforms from naïve wife to a much stronger and determined woman by the end of the show. It was a laugh a minute and had the audience in fits from beginning to end and is certainly an unmissable night of comedy.