Shall Owe Words

Disgusted is a mild form of the putrid revulsion that I feel towards the play that I was unlucky enough to witness last night, QTC’s production of “The Prisoner of Second Avenue”.The times have changed, dear friends, and an attempted social commentary of 1976 is no longer the social commentary of 2008. The production was immensely flawed, from the overtly sexist tones and the intolerable plasticity of the characters, to the repetitive script, compiled from what seemed to be 2 hours of filler jokes. In fact, the only point of relevance (and therefore justification) that a struggling QTC spokesman could find for the production of this play was the freshly announced US recession and its entirely coincidental similarity to the ’stunningly brilliant’ plot.

Nice one.

From the opening seconds of “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” the production was textbook, freshly retrieved from the hugely popular ‘profit-guaranteed-script-recycling-bin’. At best, it was an empty performance, full of stereotypes and offence. Husband dominant, wife subservient. Husband unreachable and distant, wife intuitive and communicative. This would be excusable if it was an obvious play on the roles, a caricature of what society had/has become. Instead, the characters themselves became purely caricatures, capable only of transmitting the overtly invariable image of a ‘classic’ sitcom couple.

My, what an insight into reality. My two cents? Do not see this play.