By Stephen Dubois

When the Shaw Festival last produced One for the Pot, in 1985, it ended up playing in additional cities and even had a filmed performance on CBC. It went down in Canadian theatre history as one of the company’s great successes. And rightly so. It’s a delight from beginning to end. This new version of the 1959 comedy by Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton carries that torch to a new generation of theatregoers.

As the curtain rises, we see a stunning set—one of the best I’ve ever seen at The Shaw. Detailed, meticulously dressed, and dripping in the budget the Festival Theatre reserves for its most prized productions. All the action takes place in this single setting, but there is so much to enjoy and so many literal moving parts to it that it always finds a way to tantalize. In addition, the lighting is so effective that we allow our imaginations to fill in the offstage spaces: the open doors leading off to the unseen gardens, for example, or the ballroom teeming with guests down a hallway. But the intricacies of the set are found in the doors, closets and rooms on the side; all of which have one universal purpose: to hide away, distract, and allow the same actor to play multiple roles and reappear from multiple locations. The set is almost another performer. Every door and hiding place is part of the choreography.

I attended the post-performance Q&A, and leading actor Peter Fernandes stated that this was the absolute hardest role of his career to perform. And it’s easy to understand why. Playing (spoiler alert) all four Hickory Wood brothers, maintaining the unique body language, accent, costuming for each, hitting every mark, and executing every sneaky trick from the stage to allow him to seamlessly transition from character to character must have been daunting. But Fernandes is so brilliant at this that he makes it look easy. The rest of the cast also has to be on their game to make each of these transitions work. At times, Martin Happer as Charlie Barnet was more like a ringmaster in this theatrical circus. His character has so much stage time. The same is true of Sanjay Talwar as the butler, Jugg. Both pave the way for the action to move unerringly to its next pivot point. Camille Eanga-Selenge (in her very first play vs. the musicals she is well known to perform) was spellbinding as the love interest, and Patrick Galligan as the crotchety Jonathan Hardcastle played the role marvelously. All the supporting roles were equally effective. Director Chris Abraham keeps this elaborate production moving with remarkable precision. With four versions of one character constantly entering, exiting, hiding and reappearing, even the slightest miscalculation could derail the entire experience.

I must say it was just a slight bit hard to hear the actors at times.  Perhaps the considerable depth of the stage hindered vocal projection a little. I wasn’t straining to hear, per se, but it was on the quiet side for sure.   When there were several characters talking at once a few words were missed by my ears.  But so much of the play does not rely on words alone to propel the story.

The brand of slapstick used here echoes the best work of the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy—a definite nod to yesteryear. There’s a wonderful moment in cinema history during a chase sequence in the 1980 film The Gods Must Be Crazy: a banana peel is thrown, and the pursuer slips and falls. Everyone laughed at this in theaters, but not because the person slipped. In that moment, audiences laughed because someone slipping on a banana peel was still funny. This vestige of Vaudeville and silent cinema had elicited a laugh after all those decades.  And that’s where One for the Pot succeeds best: it reminds us that while styles of comedy may age, the instinct to laugh when someone walks through the wrong door, falls over, or gets caught at precisely the wrong moment is apparently eternal.

With just five weeks remaining before One for the Pot closes on October 11 at the Festival Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, there is still plenty of time to catch this wonderfully executed bit of theatrical machinery in action.  One for the Pot – Shaw Festival Theatre