BWW Reviews: Room for Doubt in Sugar-Daddy's LADY LUCK at the Intimate Theatre

Sugar-daddy Theatre Company's LADY LUCK is a pretty bleak affair. Relentlessly nihilistic, the play is set in Cape Town's seedy underbelly, a world in which exotic dancers mingle with mobsters and where loan sharks circle their unfortunate prey. Following 2011's RELATIONSHIT!, LADY LUCK is Marlisa Doubell's sophomore stab at playwriting and is an earnest attempt to create a contemporary human drama, but one which is foiled by a lack of depth that starts on the page and is intensified on the stage at the Intimate Theatre, a fringe venue in Cape Town that sadly feels like it has slipped into the background after a number of years in which it has hosted productions of classic plays, contemporary musicals to new works by up-and-coming South African theatremakers.

LADY LUCK is the story of Lisa, a retired exotic dancer with dreams of becoming a croupier, who gets involved with a Greek loan shark, Nic, after being left stranded on the streets of Cape Town by her emotionally volatile fiancé, Dean. Dean believes he saw Lisa messing around with another guy on the night of her last show and, after he has beaten this man to within an inch of his life, is dragged into a warehouse by Nic, who sells him on the idea of opening an upmarket and legitimate lounge bar. After slicing open their hands and becoming blood brothers, the pair go into business. All seems to be going well until these two narrative lines intersect, creating a love triangle that is played out against a backdrop of private poker circles, shady deals and dark sexual encounters.

Even a brief synopsis of LADY LUCK begins to reveal how convoluted a narrative it is. But while the plot has been worked out to the last detail, moving through many twists and turns, the play proves to be completely superficial in its other dramatic constituents. The characters are flat, lacking agency and logic in the way they are drawn. The dialogue veers from the competent to the implausible, with many awkward phrases and trite expressions eliciting raised eyebrows and low chuckles from the audience. But most distressingly, the play lacks any thematic depth. LADY LUCK puts forward no worthwhile interrogation of its milieu, nor does Doubell get to grips with what she is trying to say about human nature and the extremities to which people can be pushed in desperate circumstances. She needs to go back to the drawing board with this script and figure out what it is all about.

Things are not helped along by the physical production of the play. After a captivatingly directed opening scene - which follows a rather gauche and erotically sterile pole dancing video - Yvonne Copley's direction loses steam. Rhythmically, the play lacks drive and there is little sense of dramatic tension as the play moves towards its conclusion. Nigel Sweet's set design does the production no favours either, with a team of stagehands resetting set pieces and props between each scene. With an horrific tin foil-covered monstrosity that is somehow meant to represent the interior of Nic's sophisticated bar as its centrepiece, the design is not a successful one for this play in this space.

The performances too are something of a mixed bag, but - in fairness - the trio of actors is fighting a losing battle when it comes to delivering a compelling experience given that with which they have to work. Most successful of the three is Aidan Whytock as Nic. The Greek accent required by the part functions similarly to a mask in performance, because as a self-taught second-language English speaker, the flaws in the dialogue become less of an issue. Liberated from these shackles, Whytock can get on with the business of getting under Nic's skin and he delivers a performance that is threatening and seedy and believable.

After a promising start in an excellent first scene opposite Whytock, Bjorn Steinbach is saddled with a character that goes nowhere, leaving him to stumble around the stage and bleed a lot as his character gets beaten, stabbed and thrown into walls during the course of the play. Of the three, Sabine Palfi emerges as the weak link. There seems to be nothing going on underneath her kittenish good looks, leaving the audience with a sincere, but shallow performance.

Birthing new plays is no easy affair. Seeing through an idea from conception to execution requires gestation, tenacity and the negotiation of many various aspects of production. While resolve and infrastructure seem to be no problem for Doubell and Sugar-daddy, LADY LUCK needs more time to be teased out into a satisfying dramatic and theatrical experience. Without greater depth of engagement at a conceptual level, the play has little to offer in the contemporary South African theatre scene.

To post a comment, you must register and login.