A Simple Act of Kindness

A Simple Act of Kindness is a comedy about ‘getting into the property market’ - or what used to be called for most folks, ‘buying your own home.’  In other words, it’s a play about money - having it, losing it, lying about it, and the corrosive effect it can have on relationships and even one’s sanity.

Sophia (Lou Wall), whose paying job is, ironically, working with refugees, finds an ‘apartment’ the mortgage on which she can just afford - with a little help from her Dad Tony (Joe Petruzzi), and a little coercion of gay sort-of-friend Greg (Khisraw Jones-Shukoor) to pretend to be her fiancé.  The ‘apartment’ - her mother Julie (Sarah Sutherland) calls it a ‘a flat’ - is pokey, badly designed, and inconvenient (the clever design is by Jacob Battista and Sophie Woodward), but hey, Sophia is in - she’s a property owner, she has an asset. 

And like anyone with an asset (rather than a home), she’s already thinking about how her asset will appreciate and how this dump is just the first step to bigger and better things.

Of course, things almost immediately go wrong.  There would be no comedy if they did not, but what goes wrong are contemporary phenomena, completely in keeping with the zeitgeist.  Travel agent Tony (who may have been fudging about his income anyway) loses his job due to COVID lockdowns.  The apartment building, more than ten years old, has ‘concrete cancer’ that will cost many thousands to repair.  A crack (both literal and metaphoric) opens in the floor.  The pretence of Sophia and Greg’s ‘relationship’ wears thin - and Julie discovers just how bad - financially - things are - so bad that she and Tony lose their house…

A Simple Act of Kindness is, like all the best comedy, deeply serious.  Playwright Ross Mueller clearly wants to dramatize and satirise - albeit as farce - the current insanity of the ‘property market’ from which so many are excluded - and then the fraught and precarious nature of someone like Sophia breaking in - and then the way money reverses family relationships - i.e., that is, who’s earning and who’s dependent.  Possibly Mueller tries to pack too much in (the play feels longer than it needs to be) and he sets things up - such as Sophia and Greg having to share a tiny bedroom, or the concrete cancer - that don’t pay off.

But director Peter Houghton makes some curious choices here.  Houghton directed the delightful The Heartbreak Choir, which really was funny without trying so very hard to be funny.  Lou Wall, a brilliant solo performer, just manages to be  the centre of things as the catastrophes descend on them, and Jones-Shukoor maintains an outsider’s calm even while trapped in this madness.  But they too are drawn into that mode of comedy in which the cast and director appear to have decided, ‘Hey, we’re in a comedy - so let’s be funny!’  Seasoned performers Joe Petruzzi and Sarah Sutherland push their characters into caricature.  And after some promising slapstick (a brilliant sight gag with a tape measure), everyone goes over the top from scene one onwards: loud, manic, frenetic, and, frankly, annoying.  I can’t say what Mueller thinks of this production, but for me, what he appears to have to say gets rather buried under the melee.  Isn’t it funnier if we think it’s funny, but for the folks on stage all this is deadly serious?

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Jodie Hutchinson