Shear Madness at The Mill at Sonning Review
Photo: Pamela Raith Photography
Written by Stephen Gilchrist for Theatre and Tonic
Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in exchange for an honest review. All views are our own
It did not surprise me that the ‘Shear Madness’ of the title was a pink and green unisex hairdressing salon, when in my professional life as a solicitor I once represented a barber shop in Spitalfields called ‘Jack the Clipper’! That is what hairdressers do.
What did surprise me, for the first thirty minutes of this two and a quarter piece though, was that on a glorious midsummer’s afternoon in Sonning I was apparently witness to a cruel joke being played on a room of hardened critics in the presentation of a panoply of hoary old pantomime jokes, popular cultural and local geographical references, an outrageously camp Dame, oops..sorry.. ‘hairdresser,’ and a cellar full of appalling malapropisms. Until, that is, I saw the point of this clever, deliberately awful event.
I hesitate to call it a play, the authorship of which, appearing in tiny print in the programme, is attributed to Paul Pörtner. Shear Madness is based on his German-language play ‘Scherenschnitt’ which was written and first performed at the Theater Ulm in Ulm, Germany in 1963. Pörtner has long since departed for hairdressing heaven. Also I did not know, ignoramus that I am, that Shear Madness, an interactive whodunit play, is one of the longest-running non-musical plays in the world. I mean, who would have guessed?
If any reader can recall the super Rupert Holmes Tony award winning musical, ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ from the eighties, in which, due to the unfinished nature of Charles Dicken’s novel, the audience were invited pick a murderer amongst a number of alternate suspects and endings, then, well, this is Drood on speed! It is completely bonkers but ultimately great fun.
The set up during the first half of Act 1 presents four caricatured personalities working in or visiting a delightfully appealing designed salon (by Alex Marker) in Henley. Think ‘Miss Scarlett,’ ‘Colonel Mustard’ and fellow suspects in Cluedo. The unseen owner of the salon, Isabel Czerny, who lives above the shop and was once a revered concert pianist who ran screaming out of her last concert at the Albert Hall and never returned to performing, (go figure!), is murdered. Two coppers appear to discover the culprit. From then on the show is interactive. The audience is invited to shout out anomalies and inconstancies in the evidence, ask questions of the suspects and eventually to vote for their choice. The finale, like ‘Drood,’ is tailored to the audience’s choice.
As I have said, the concept and its execution is completely barmy, but, as I eventually discovered, only barmy in a good way. The actors have to be quick witted in their responses and come backs and clearly improvisation plays a large part in this free-for-all. They are all excellent, in particular Paul O’Neill who conducts the investigation as the senior ‘tec with his assistant detective (Gwithian Evans) and comperes this chaos. He rather reminded me of the comedian Lee Mack in his delivery and charm. Rosaleen Burton plays the manager of the salon in the style of Sybil Fawlty whilst the rich as Croesus, Mrs Schubert, is amusingly portrayed by Natalie Ogle. Musical theatre loving, ultra camp hairdresser, Tony, flounces about the stage to good effect as depicted by Daniel Cane while Jonathan Markwood plays the mysterious, narcissistically elegant Edward Lawrence.
This is a show (as directed by Sally Hughes) that very much depends on its audience of the night and I must say that on my visit, the house was only too keen to involve themselves in the on-stage melee. It’s one of those shows, that, as a critical observer, you don’t think can get any worse, until you suddenly see the point of it, and realise it is laughing at itself. It is clever, light, fluffy, and silly beyond words but I loved it! If you’re not smiling on the way in, I guarantee you will be on the way out!
★★★★
