Half Trick Theatre’s latest production, Waiting For Wonka, was a coherent production of an off-the-wall script, particularly boasting unique attention to detail in its production design.
Courtney Bassett and Caden Scott first made the characters featured in this Wonka parody in a Sims video game, and the text very much feels like a time capsule of mid-2010s (sub)culture, in the best possible way. It is edgy, it is hyper-aware of identity politics, and it has got a distinct air of Fanfiction to the whole thing. Featuring unexpected queer-coded match ups, frank explorations of the weirdest feitsh-laden corners of the internet, and increasingly genre-bending plot points that turn it from kitchen-sink drama, to dark comedy, to body horror, it is a script that could only have emerged from our chronically online generation.
Bassett also directs, and this is largely what makes the production as good as it is. She is a director with a real sense for punchlines, but she also gives the audience multiple angles with which to look at the material. The production seems to have utilised every avenue of approach; that means that even if a joke does not land for you, it can be read as a piece of character development, or your focus can be redirected to a performer’s reaction, or the absurd cruelness of the situation can be re-highlighted. It is a slick, engaging piece of theatre with humour, pathos, and a clear theatrical know-how.
Another stand out element is the production design from James Jennifer Wright, Grant Duff and Indrid Heron. Each and every prop is meticulously designed, despite most of them being out of the majority of the audience’s sightlines. There is some particularly audacious work at the climax of the piece, featuring a massive corpse that is really funny, but also disturbingly macabre. Each element locks us into Wonka World. This is a real highlight of the piece, and frankly the work would not have worked nearly as well without it. It is brilliant to see an emerging theatre company care so much about the look and feel of the play on this plastic level, and it really elevates the work to a different height.
Performances were relished by actors across the board, each character really “role-playing” the script with such seriousness that made it all the funnier. Rory Drinnan-Murray was a particularly funny Charlie Bucket, commanding the space with a very Edwardian brand of campness. That being said, the real stand-out was Caden Scott as Augustus Gloop… a performance so engaging it just about made him the piece’s hero. Gloop was played as a sort of Falstaffian Eeyore that was seriously ridiculous and basically impossible not to burst out laughing at, whilst also being this really layered, way too detailed performance, with a lot of pent up trauma, tragedy, and tenderness. I almost want to say it has no place being in a Willy Wonka parody, but that is the whole joy of this project – it is abundantly clear that some very talented theatre makers are playing with this text (which might otherwise be discarded as low-brow) with such self-awareness, intelligence, and joy.
The play does lag a bit, and at the tricky space of fifty minutes, it felt like it had nowhere else to go, but as I walked out after its audacious climax, it all felt necessary. That being said, this really feels like it should sit at sixty minutes. Also, there were moments where the piece’s physicality could have been emphasised with a little more crispness. A comedy this raucous might have been more engaging had the characters extremes been a little more expressed through individual gesture.
All in all, this was a welcome production from a wonderful theatre company, with grace, humour, and serious panache. I’m looking forward to catching their next project!
Image courtesy of Half Trick Theatre.