An Experiment in Scotch

As part of our ongo­ing effort to seem cool, trendy and urbane, the mis­sus and I went to see Amy’s View at The­atre Three last night as part of our sea­son ticket pack­age there. Over­all, the show was a good one with some solid char­ac­ter por­tray­als by Con­nie Coit and Danielle Pickard.

Amy’s View is a play writ­ten by the British play­wright Sir David Hare. The orig­i­nal cast included Judi Dench so it cer­tainly has that going for it. It seems to be pretty well writ­ten and has some thought pro­vok­ing themes run­ning through it, most notably the con­trast between the the­ater and pop­u­lar shows and media on tele­vi­sion and film. The pro­tag­o­nist is Amy, a level headed woman who has fallen in love with Dominic, the main antag­o­nist as it turns out. Amy’s mother Esme is a noted actress in the Lon­don the­ater scene who seems to dis­ap­prove highly of Dominic. Dominic is a critic/filmmaker who is at con­stant odds with both Amy and Esme.

The show is slow to start but picks up quickly after the first scene. An inter­est­ing theme that runs through the show is how all the major con­flicts are resolved out­side the actual act­ing and the audi­ence is left to see how the char­ac­ters cope some­times years after the con­flict. This is a lit­tle dis­con­cert­ing and for me, takes away from the abil­ity to iden­tify with char­ac­ters by becom­ing involved in how they deal with actions in their lives.

The play’s sec­ond act is cer­tainly the strongest though the end­ing feels as though the play­wright got tired of writ­ing this par­tic­u­lar play and just pushed it out the door.

The char­ac­ters are mostly well played though Dominic seems to have only one emo­tion, anger and it is expressed at a con­stant vol­ume level, jet air­plane. That is unfor­tu­nate since the con­flict of the play is nec­es­sar­ily con­trolled by Dominic and it would be nice to see a slightly more nuanced inter­pre­ta­tion. I haven’t read the play so maybe this is all inten­tional. Sonny Franks plays Esme’s would be suitor Frank and as long as you haven’t seen “I Love You, You’re Per­fect, Now Change”, he does an able job. I could only see him singing “Sex and The Mar­ried Cou­ple” but that’s prob­a­bly more the fault of this reviewer than it is the actor himself.

Over­all, I’d say this play is a Glen­livet in the scotch scale of reviews (some­thing I just made up) and is worth tak­ing in on a Fri­day or Sat­ur­day night.