Brit wit

Lettice and Lovage is eccentric fun

by Bill Rodriguez

Oh how the British do love their eccentrics. One of the most endearing to come down the theatrical pike in recent years is in Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage (at Brown Summer Theatre through July 12).

The comedy is an overly long but constantly entertaining excursion with two women who, it first appears, would get along about as well as oil and water. Lettice (pronounced like the vegetable) Douffet works at Fustian House, a venerable manor where not much of interest known to have occurred over the centuries. So tour guide Lettice (Marilyn Meardon) embellishes, turning a modest family crest, figuratively speaking, into the Bayeux tapestry. She takes an incident in which Queen Victoria almost stumbled on the main stairway and, tour after tour, works it into an Indiana Jones adventure. The lord of the manor didn't merely take the queen's arm, he leapt up some 20 steps in a single bound. Following that, they went down to not just a banquet but to groaning tables "plied high with puffins, coneys and hedgehogs." Lettice's imagination even comes up with a murder in the house, via a garland of poisonous herbs. Historicity be damned. Oliver Stone, move over.

Then comes the wet blanket, in the form of Miss Lotte Schoen (Anne Brady). The personnel director from the Preservation Trust, which is in charge of the manor, sneaks into one of the tour lines, guide book in hand, to spy on Lettice. There's a fuming confrontation. The jig's up.

This premise and conflict would make a giddy one-act play, but Shaffer is out to bag bigger, or at least longer, theatrical game. (We couldn't very well expect less from the author of the thunderous Equus and Amadeus.) So Act II becomes an unlikely -- but quite convincing -- bonding exercise when Lettice is called into Lotte's London office to be fired. Twice as many letters have come in to support Lettice's lively tours than to express annoyance at her historical fictions. But when imagination bumps into reality, we know who has to stand aside.

The play is more interesting than the obvious set-up -- Free Spirit inspires a Stifled Soul to take wing -- suggests. That's a given, and Shaffer uses that base to build two fascinating personality portraits. Lettice grew up in France, traveling with her mother's Shakespearean touring company, bringing fervid translations of the Bard to a hostile Gallic gentry. Meardon gives Lettice both heat and hauteur, and although some of her delivery is halting it conveys dignified spunk.

Her arrogant adversary is no less sympathetic, eventually. In Brady's best scene, Lotte is allowed to be more than a tight-bunned (at both ends) Teutonic stereotype. Brady softens her earlier stridency into steely determination as Lotte rails against the dismal state of architecture, which she studied in university. By the time Lotte declares that she has always loved buildings more than the people in them, it comes across as idealistic rather than misanthropic.

Again, the story could end there, but Shaffer tacks on yet another act. Apparently enamored by his bonding spinsters, the playwright contrives an unlikely Odd Couple scenario that Neil Simon would be proud of. (No compliment intended.) Suffice it to say, a misunderstanding, an ax and the possibility of prison are all thrown in.

Oddly, director James Crawford staged this all like a slammed-door farce rather than the mannered comedy it is. The adversarial situation and Lotte's statements make her

a martinet, so there is no need to make her a pinch-faced screamer. Stifling tyrannical urges is funnier to watch than is goose-stepping excess. Similarly, Lotte's nervous secretary Miss Farmer (Christina Nicosia) is a broad caricature of an oppressed underling, closer to slapstick than to understated British humor. Which is all a pity. While the comedy is a rambling tale, or three, the characters in Lettice and Lovage can be fun to follow around for an evening if we're not put off by them.