London Theater Journal: Laughing Wall to Wall

Truly funny plays tend to be the exception rather than the rule in New York these days. So I have grabbed the chance here to wander across the spectrum of what makes people laugh – and groan and sigh.

Within only a few days, I was able to savor both the midnight blues of the first-rate revival of Kevin Elyot’s “My Night With Reg,” a portrait of gay men quipping and quailing in the shadow of AIDS, and the stage-blood-red farce of “The Play That Goes Wrong,” an unexpected, gut-busting hit about an incompetent amateur troupe staging a mystery melodrama.

I also sampled two distinctively colored satires, each very much of the moment in which it was written: Peter Barnes’s pitch-dark “The Ruling Class,” a gory vivisection of the British aristocracy from the 1960s, and the acid-hued “Golem,” a technologically ingenious fable from the company called 1927 at the Young Vic (with inspired animation design by Paul Barritt) about our own technologically ingenious age. These were both admonitory in tone, and kept me at an intrigued but chilled distance.

“My Night With Reg” and “The Play That Goes Wrong” are more emotionally immersive works, perhaps better suited to a jet-lagged New Yorker in need of instant catharsis. Both elicit tears, though through very different means. “Wrong” is one of those breakneck exercises in idiocy that make you laugh till you cry, despite yourself. “Reg,” on the other hand, is a stealthy comedy of manners that shifts from silly to sad before you know it.

Mark Danner discusses “Guantánamo Diary,” by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and David Adam discusses his book, “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop.”Read more…

The renowned Israeli conductor Israel Yinon died after collapsing during a concert in Switzerland.Read more…

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