Archived Edition: April 18, 2007 | Back to Current	Sep 10, 2010

Student play 'Irma Vep' satirizes genre and gender

The plot twists in Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep: A Penny Dreadful are complicated enough, but by far the most entertaining aspect of the play is the quick costume and gender changes its two actors go through. Directed by Jess Phillips ’07, the play stars Greta Wilson ’07 and Eric Phillips ’09, as all of the play’s half-dozen characters in quick succession. The play showed in the Adams Memorial Theater last Friday and Saturday.

Wilson plays the brogue-accented maid, Jane, as well as the (male) Lord Edgar Hillcrest; Eric Phillips takes on the part of the unspecifically crippled servant Nicodemus and the (female) Lady Enid, Lord Edgar’s new bride.

As Lord Edgar, Wilson dons a boxy coat and walks with the stiff, swinging legs and affected masculine swagger of a cowboy. As Jane, she walked in tiny steps, hunched over, sashaying slightly; her lilting brogue is exaggerated, but impeccable. The masquerade is very effective.

Eric Phillips plays Nicodemus as though approximating the Hunchback of Notre Dame, with a deep country accent that sometimes slips. His occasional slips don’t actually disrupt the flow of the play too much; at least, no more than the continual slips of the ridiculously blond wig he wears as the twittering falsetto Lady Enid he plays.

The actors faced a challenge working within the framework of a senior project for the theater program. They had to create the play on a budget of $50, with the added caveat that they could expect only minimal help from teachers. Nonetheless, they carried off the production marvelously. The props they used, while minimal, nonetheless sufficed to tell the story, and were well used to poke fun at the inherently ridiculous structure of the play itself.

The sound effects, created playfully onstage in full view of the audience, add another layer of self-conscious hilarity to the lighthearted production. Sure, the effects were far from believable. For example, every time the maid intones the name of a dreaded wolf, ‘Victor,’ an ominous chord plays as she pauses lugubriously.

Happily, believability is not an object in this wildly farcical, ridiculous play. Putting the special effects onstage just added to the humor and laid-back feeling that permeated the whole affair.

Costume changes, too, barely cling to plausibility (though the transgendered acting is quite impressive, as are the speed of the changes), and make real their wealth of comic potential. At one point, Eric Phillips hides behind a curtain and pops his head out at regular intervals, with and without his ridiculous blond wig, as he simulates two characters talking to each other in real time. Eric Phillips also turns into a ‘werewolf’ fully onstage, donning a wolf hat and furry wolf-paw-like gloves. His death scene soon after is one of the funniest I’ve ever seen: he falls straight forward onto the stage, landing with a thump and sending the wolf-y accoutrements flying.

Wilson plays convincingly as both the aging maid and the male Egyptologist, Lord Edgar. Her performance is actually very convincing, less ostentatiously false than Eric Phillips’s. She does a great job of exaggerating innuendo to wonderful comic effect.

The plot, as I’ve mentioned before, is almost too complicated to put down on paper, and in any case, it’s really a mix of cliché and intrigue that serves almost as a background to the twister stereotypes the actors play. To give the bare bones: Lord Edgar’s wife, Irma Vep, has just died, but he still keeps her portrait enshrined in Mandacrest, his mansion. He believes she and her son, Victor have been killed by her pet wolf (also named Victor), whom he hunts, but the real killer, presumably a werewolf, is still on the loose. Add a covert vampire, a new wife, a mysterious Egyptian tomb, a resurrected mummy and the possibility that Irma Vep is still alive and you have the plot. It ends happily, despite the death of half the ‘cast.’

All in all, The Mystery of Irma Vep is a terrific production. Every moment makes use of the inherent comic potential of the setup. The plot, while convoluted, actually managed to surprise me, and despite its many clichés, is actually fairly original. Jess Phillips, Eric Phillips and Wilson certainly deserve respect and admiration for their achievement as they worked within such limiting constraints.