Tricky relationship issues at heart of new SA play

The scenario arises after a misdirected text message brings an unintended guest (an ex-fiancee, no less) to a dinner party for two.

Charmaine Weir-Smith (pictured) plays Rachel, the guest in question, opposite Antony Coleman’s Tony. Jaci de Villiers rounds out the cast as the intended target of the original message.

Weir-Smith has been away from the stage for a while, acting in Binnelanders, Generations and elsewhere.

“Theatre and television are really different beasts,” says Weir-Smith.

“I’ve really enjoyed the last four-and-a-half years in TV, but I have ached to be on stage, and perhaps it’s just a case of putting it out there and a result coming to you. I read for this play sometime last year, but a couple of things didn’t come together in terms of funding. Then I got the call at the beginning of this year to say it was going ahead and would I be involved, and it’s been a joyous experience.”

Has she adapted to the change in technique?

“The immediacy of the stage is the thing,” Weir-Smith says, “and especially with comedy, where you’re getting so much energy from the audience.

“You’re either in your truth – and they’re getting it – or you’re not.”

What happens if an audience misses the point? The only desired response is a laugh, whereas in a drama, a groan or sigh can be as meaningful, though they’re not as audible to an actor.

“I’ve done shows like that, and it sits like a lead balloon in you – it’s ghastly,” smiles Weir-Smith.

“Here, we’ve done two sold-out shows at the Hilton Festival, and the audience was fantastic. We got laughs in places we didn’t know we were going to get laughs. But audiences also have their own dynamics. Sometimes you get a listening audience, and you think, ‘Well, they haven’t laughed, and we’re going to get a terrible response’, but then they leap to their feet at the end, because they’ve understood it in a different way to what you’d anticipated. That’s another way in which theatre is different to TV.”

The feedback process from audience members differs as well. “It does,” agrees Weir-Smith.

“We actually had a woman in Hilton who’d been through a similar situation to my character and she said she’d sat there with a lump in her throat.

“Now, it’s a comedy, but the thing with that is that you’re laughing at somebody else’s pain, and she’d unfortunately been through the same thing, and she met us with tears in her eyes.”

Responses to Weir-Smith’s TV work can be equally intense, as fans of the soapies she’s been in have invested in “their” shows for years. “Invested is an understatement,” Weir-Smith grins.

“The lines are just so blurred. Antony plays my ex-fiancee here, but he played my husband, Michael, in Binnelanders, and a woman stopped me in the Checkers in Emmarentia one day and said, ‘Will you stop being so horrible to Michael! You’re awful to him.’ and I had to explain to her that she needed to hang in there. I knew, but I couldn’t tell her, that the storyline was going to take those characters to a better place.

“There’s some sort of insanity that rules in the soap world. I think it’s because it happens every day.”

Starring in An Unromantic Comedy with an established creative partner must make things a little easier?

“Antony and I have been great friends for 15 years and we’ve done three plays and a soap together,” Weir-Smith says.

“There’s a wonderful creative chemistry when you know somebody; an understanding and a shorthand that makes the onstage relationship real.”

Is working with people where a relationship is already established a potentially good model for making new theatre in general (An Unromantic Comedy is directed by Craig Freimond, writer Rosalind Butler’s husband)?

“For something like this, the dynamic has to be so truthful,” says Weir-Smith.

“If you need to be vulnerable, working with people you know and trust is much easier.”