When the young Tatiana’s act of heroism for a drowning cat is
met with her father Maximillian Dressler’s insane head for inventions, the two events
conspire to turn their lives in ever more bizarre directions. And I’m not just talking
about the cat.
Before my viewing of Christopher William Hill’s Clockwork
Canaries at the Theatre Royal had even begun, my eye couldn’t help being drawn
to the homely yet unsettling nature of Natasha Jenkins’s set: a colourful couch,
a cluttered desk, a simple dining table for three, all foregrounding a wall
scattered with a child’s sketches of mausoleums and skulls. This should have
warned me about the nature of the child who entered the set carrying a sack
which held the ill-fated moggy. Played by Charlie Cameron, known most recently
for her role alongside Ralph Fiennes in The Master Builder, the character of
Tatiana is sweetly charming and morbid in turns, as much a result of her mother’s
death as her father’s overbearing ambition. That father, played by Dominic
Marsh – recent roles including Tristan in Tristan and Yseult at Shakespeare’s
Globe – possesses a nervous enthusiasm which seemed to spark from Marsh’s
dishevelled curls, filling the space with rage or excitement one moment, and
dissipating in bleak, merciless acceptance the next.
Of course, this double act would not be complete without the
cat, or Count Frederick Sebastian as he is christened. The suitably bedraggled
life-sized puppet was designed by Christopher Fowkes, who has worked with The
Little Angel Puppet Theatre, as well as in several episodes of The Mighty Boosh
and on 2014’s Muppets Most Wanted. Puppet operator Richard Booth, associate
artist of Flabbergast Theatre, moves and voices this furry black form with such
an effortless feline attitude that I almost forgot at times that Booth was even
there. Licking and leaping, meowing and hissing, I’m sure there must be a real
moggy in Booth’s life to have warranted such behaviour. For the Dresslers, however,
life would have been fine, I like to think, just the three of them, if not for
the canaries of the play’s title.
Belonging to the character of Mrs. Stein-Hoffelman, an opera
singer and one of four characters in the show played by Christopher Staines –
most recently seen in Julius Caesar at the Storyhouse and Grosvenor Park – the feathers
of these realistically blood-filled little prop birds are soon scattered across
the set. As I imagine many of Staines’ costumes would have been backstage, the
speed with which he often had to change between characters. The comedically
intense widow-to-be Mrs Stein-Hoffelman, the suspicious detective, Tatiana’s
confused idol the undertaker, and the Hoffelmans’ equally intense solicitor Agertoft
– whose excitable silky terrier kept Booth on his toes and the audience
chuckling. But then, almost everything about Staines was hilarious for its over
the top-ness: a tongue waggle here, a painfully amusing soprano there, and an
ample dose of bosom to top it off. However, it was the chemistry between
Dressler and Mrs. Stein-Hoffelman which sets the cogs of this play whirring, just
as director Luke Kernaghan planned, drawing it ‘like clockwork’ to its
expectedly unexpected conclusion.
It is a classic plot subverted, of a broke widower finding
love in a serial widow with no affection for her current soon-to-be-stiff. The
only thing standing in their way is the cat and the daughter, both of whom are
very suspicious of the new romance blossoming among the tombstones. But when
Count Frederick Sebastian takes matters into his own paws, every convention gets
thrown out the window – or, in this case, mauled to death and buried. There is the
inevitable body in the closet and some in-character cross-dressing which makes
for an awkward but not uncomfortable scene between Agertoft and Dressler –
which I think Marsh and Staines are complete naturals at – but otherwise, almost
nothing about this play is by the book. Even Tatiana’s love-interest Franz, a
delivery boy played by Jeremy Ang Jones (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) who
wears multiple disguises just to see her, is not who he appears to be.
So it is only fitting that Dressler should eat the dead
animals, that Count Frederick Sebastian catches, from a bowl on the floor. That
Tatiana should sing about having maggots in her brain and fantasise about her
own death with unnerving innocence. That, having chomped his way through almost
every one of Staines’s incarnations off-stage, Count Frederick Sebastian should
emerge in a moment reminiscent of Snowball in Rick and Morty – for those who
haven’t seen it, just imagine a robotically bipedal cat. And by the close…? Let’s
just say, the image of Dominic Marsh crawling around in a bondage style harness
won’t leave me any time soon.
There were moments of sadness, acknowledging the loss of a
mother which I can sympathise with, and moments where perhaps Kernaghan was
trying too hard to be ironic or comedic, but the overwhelming
feeling was one of pleasure in witnessing two opposing genres meld so well on
stage. If happiness is, as Dressler says, ‘the vessel into which all dark
things are poured’, then I can safely say I was happy watching Clockwork
Canaries.
For those of you who have been thoroughly convinced, I recommend
you catch this performance at the Theatre Royal Plymouth before March 10th.
