The Three Musketeers

Sword fighting, swash-buckling heroism, a conniving cardinal, a kitsch king and an aldulterous queen! What’s not to like?

This production is a bit of fun that’s fairly well done for a community theatre and some actors who have never held a sword before! They look good, they fight well and they do their best with a script that is an ambitious adaptation of a well known and oft’ adapted novel.

Playwright Ken Ludwig (Lend Me a Tenor) has tweaked the plot by adding another female character – d’Artagnan’s sister Sabine, who also wants to be a musketeer – and allowing the play to become … well … a spoof. Fortunately this works – just! Despite many scenes that telescope all the complications that took hundreds of pages to describe in the novel, the story is clear – and though the character development is minimal, the actors and the director make the play work by sustaining a fairly quick pace and a lot of heroic posturing.

Mark Banks chose an ambitious play for his directorial debut, but he obviously realised that, with a good fight director (Kyle Rowling), the play would work if his cast could keep up the pace and appreciate the nature of the play. And they do – despite having to fight, dance, sing … and struggle through very narrow exits.

Taddeh Vartanians creates a naïve, trusting d’Artagnan who is caring, easily duped, quick to champion the weak. Vartanians finds the purity of the country lad in his simple depiction of the boy from Gascony, seeking maturity in Paris with his little sister, Sabine, in tow.

Sabine, cheeky, immature tomboy one minute, flirtatious teenager the next, is played by Joanne Coleman, who gives a snappy performance, sword in hand at times, as she keeps up with the Musketeers, especially Aramis (Chenier Moore).

Moore, Nicholas Carter (Athos) and Rai Trippett (Porthos) play the Musketeers as Ludwig has recreated them – hasty to react, a little bit shallow, full of heroic energy. Their fights are fast and furious – and they look very debonair in their tabards and plumed hats (costume design, Susan Carveth).

John Willis-Richards, snidely supercilious as the scheming cardinal Richelieu, makes the most of all the stock characteristics of the melodramatic villain, as does Elizabeth Macgregor as his vicious puppet, Milady. It would be very easy for the audience to ‘hiss’ either of them in these roles.

Dressed all in gold, Tim Van Zuylen and Emma Medbury play the childish, easily manipulated King Louis XIII, and his unfaithful wife, Queen Anne. Michael Walker doubles as d’Atagnan’s father and Treville, the commander of the Musketeers, and Anita Donovan (Constance), Daniel Collins (Rochefort), Theo Kokkinidis (Duke of Buckingham), Shane Bates (the Abess) and Emmanuel Said (the Innkeeper) complete the large cast.

On cloisters that hug the limits of the stage (obviously to allow room for multiple sword fights, one involving eight performers), Banks and his cast make the most of a play that needs energetic actors who are prepared to take a fighting chance, (pun intended), and push the pace in a play that takes a little bit of the ‘mickey’ out of Alex Dumas’ legendary characters.

Carol Wimmer

Photographer: Grant Fraser