Repertory Theatre

Imagine a mash-up of Blithe Spirit, Noises Off and Hamlet and you’ll have something approximating the plot of Repertory Theatre.  A young playwright approaches the eccentric manager of a repertory company with his first play; what follows is a hectic comedy about sex, murder, misbehaving thespian ghosts and the bard’s Danish prince.

It’s hard to pin down why the play just isn’t funny. Israeli playwright Eldad Cohen’s script has some nice touches, like the fact the playwright’s father has been bumped off by being stabbed in the nose (presumably a reference to Hamlet’s father’s murder via poison in the ear); the choreography of the piece is exceptionally clever (to say more would spoil the plot twist); and the two-man cast of Erez Drigues and Iftach Jeffrey Ophir, who together form the Tel Aviv-based theatre company The Elephant and the Mouse, act with such manic energy as to cause you to fear for their health. Perhaps that’s part of the problem – in attempting to be fast-paced and high-octane, everything becomes feverishly one note and, on a very practical level, it means the pair occasionally stumble over lines.

Plays which rely heavily on a single clever conceit, as is the case in Repertory Theatre, are not easy to pull off. And unless you have a writer of Michael Frayn’s skill, there’s a danger that you lose the audience’s interest once the conceit has been revealed. For all its potential, Repertory Theatre never manages to raise much more than a ghost of a smile.