Just saw Brian Sergent's playwriting debut, The Love of Humankind. I kinda guessed it would be foul, smelly, verbally explicit and hiliarious, and it was.
It's based on two real-life Wellington characters that Sergent knew, Mark Smith and Brian Bell. Smith (underplayed brilliantly by Ken Blackburn) keeps his moniker, but Bell is renamed Rodney Pump - and with Sergent playing the role himself he lives up to that glorious name. Presumably the name change was to distance Brian the actor from Brian the character, but this is exactly the sort of role Sergent excels at, and this is the best I've seen him since Ross Jolly's production of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming.
The play centres around Smith's 70th birthday, and is set in his dodgy old council flat which must surely be in Newtown. Pump and a couple of other mates bring vodka and a few other surprises to cheer the miserable old codger up, but Smith seems more interested in watching his money get pissed away on the horses on tv.
The rest of the cast - Anne Budd as the only female the two degenerates have any time for, Paul McLaughlin as a cheerfully bipolar druggie (yes "cheerfully bipolar" is accurate - I guess Sergent knows what he's doing as he's bipolar himself) and a brief but striking (at least to the straight guys in the audience) turn by Narelle Ahrens - are great, but Sergent wrote the plum role for himself and plays it to the hilt.
That's not to overlook Blackburn, who manages to create a memorable character by sitting in a chair peering at a race guide through a magnifying glass and hardly ever speaking.
The comedy gives way to more bitter stuff in the second half, which is good 'cause otherwise the nonstop pus & bile would get a bit tiresome. It only stops being funny to get tense. I loved every minute.
Highly recommended, provided you can deal with nonstop scatological dialogue delivered by pointedly misogynistic characters whose ambitions in life seems to be to get as drunk, stoned and down-and-out as possible. And how can you hate a play that opened with Desolation Row by Bob Dylan? (Who's more famous than Nico or Sonic Youth, by the by.)
Apparently Brian Bell made frequent appearances in the letters pages of New Zealand newspapers. I'd love to read them if anyone's got any (hint hint).
Posted by pearce at February 12, 2004 5:51 PMNarelle! She turns up in the oddest places. Cool.
Posted by: morgue at February 12, 2004 9:40 PMUmm, there's been a whole book of Bell's correspondence (not just with newspapers, but also with notables such as James K Baxter and Norman Mailer) published. It's called The Brian Bell Reader, and it's bloody funny, but gets a bit tiring in places. Look it up at the library, and if you're hooked, do my old mate Bell a favour by ordering it in from Unity Books
Posted by: Jean at June 25, 2004 10:34 AM