Theatre Review

Hotel Peccadillo

By: Adapted from the French play L’Hotel du Libre-Echange by Georges Feydeau and Maurice Desvallieres, by Morris Panych

Directed By: Morris Panych

At: The Shaw Festival Of Canada

Website: www.shawfest.com

2007 Season

Location: Niagara-On-The-Lake

Theatre: Festival Theatre

4 Stars

Reviewed By: Kindah Mardam Bey

French farce holds court at this years’ Shaw Festival and it ends up by being a saucy, raunchy and hilarious court at that! Morris Panych adapted the script from L’Hotel du Libre-Echange by Georges Feydeau and Maurice Desvallieres, but at the Shaw Festival Panych is able to fully conceptualize his adaptation as he also directs this comedy.

Peccadillo is a Spanish word meaning ‘little sin’ and apparently it was a vast understatement to call it so as two people walked out of the theatre within the first ten minutes of the production. I think they left on moral ground…which appears to move through a crowded auditorium to the exit door twice the speed of sound. Mind you, within the first ten minutes we meet Paillardin who is in a therapy session discussing how he doesn’t desire his bombshell wife. He is a critic (insert your own jokes here) and has overly critiqued his younger wife’s separate parts to the extent that he has ignored her as a whole. Dr. Pinglet a sex therapist, whose self-help books are grounded in moral, functional love within marriage, becomes the height of infidelity as he sees Paillardin’s wife waiting outside his office building for her husband. The good doctor tries to ‘cure’ Paillardin’s wife of her loneliness. Hilarity ensues as they say!

I really haven’t laughed this hard in a long time. I do not recommend this production to the humourless or those who put too much sacrosanct on sex. It is a French farce for goodness sakes; enjoy the humour, the illogic and the outlandish fun!

Dr. Pinglet intends to rendezvous with Paillardin’s wife at Hotel Peccadillo, the exact ‘theme hotel’ Paillardin will be reviewing on the same night. Dr. Pinglet’s nephew who is focused on his school studies intends to have his first sexual experience at Hotel Peccadillo with Victoire who is Dr. Pinglet’s secretary. Then Mathieu, an old school chum, turns up at Pinglet’s office with three randy airline stewardesses (what else?) and requests some of those ‘blue pills,’ but mistakenly swallows a handful of suppressants…they also end up at the Hotel Peccadillo. Maxime, an airline pilot, desperately tries to escape the stewardesses as the chaperone of the girls becomes the item of obsession for Paillardin as he mistakenly did take the ‘blue pills.’ The chaperone looks like a Russian bull dog by the way.

A stroke of genius on Panych’s part is hotel owner Georges Feydeau, yes you get it, one of the original authors. Feydeau in Hotel Peccadillo is a whimsical, cheeky, saucy dead man who lives vicariously through his occupant’s at his hotel and their escapades.

So in case the plotline wasn’t humorous enough, the stage is setup to be an optical illusion as the hotel room tapers into a point. The audience is sat in front of the widest part of a letter ‘V’ and looking in at the point. About four doors flank either side of the ‘V’ each getting smaller and smaller the further up you go. Gags like towels getting smaller for each room they get dispatched in, and the ‘big chair’ at the point of the ‘V’ which becomes a ‘little chair’ as it is walked to the front of the stage all add little jokes among the many others. In fact, the jokes seem to fall on each other and for those who did stay to watch the performance, we all laughed throughout….out loud laughter…which created a great energy in the room!

The acting was top notch; as timing is of the essence in farce, the actors really hit their marks with great efficiency. Patrick Galligan as Dr. Pinglet was brilliant! Dr. Pinglet has all of these hang ups like giving everyone pills to solve their problems and getting common sayings blended to become nonsensical and the shear physical humour was highly reminiscent of John Ritter in Three’s Company. Galligan pulls in a great performance.

Laurie Paton as the chaperone Ludmila also steals the show at the end when explaining in her heavy Russian accent what has happened over the evening events. Lots of hand gestures, terms like ‘pokey pokey’ and general confusion makes for an interesting explanation to the policeman.

Hotel Peccadillo is good fun, and a bit of a laugh. As Panych says in his Director’s Notes ‘When did it all become so serious?’ Hotel Peccadillo has lots of slamming doors, miscommunications and sexual innuendoes – all the trademarks of a French farce. However, Panych also manages to tackle some heavier subjects with humour, such as the ‘blue pills’ dependency, displaced moralism and how we have become a society who have ‘somehow, remarkably, simultaneously, become more prudish and more obscene.’