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THE ODD COUPLE by Neil Simon
Venue: Watford Palace 1991
Director: Lou Stein

Cast

Speed John Cassady
Murray Raymond Brody
Roy Billy J Mitchell
Vinnie Johnny Myers
Oscar Maddison Lou Hirsch
Felix Ungar Kerry Shale
Gwendolyn Pigeon Joanne Good
Cecily Pigeon Juliette Grassby

Review

Unless you have been locked up in a cupboard for the past 20 years there is no element of surprise in Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. The film and the television series with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon as the divorce victims, Oscar and Felix, sharing a nest with feathers flying in all directions, have become classic American comedy. So the original stage version becomes more like a television sitcom gone live and director, Lou Stein, was charged with the job of making the play endearingly familiar and fresh at the same time. He succeeds, mainly by choosing American actors Lou Hirsch and Kerry Shale for the main characters. Lou Hirsch as Oscar the divorced, broke: and sloppy sports writer, who has lived in relative unmarried bliss in an eight-room apartment for six months. This happy state is shattered when be offers shelter to newscaster Felix, a pain-in-the-neck pedantic with a line in fussy tidiness that sends his flatmate screaming on to the edge of a nervous breakdown in less than three weeks. The only thing the pair have in common is the weekly highlight, the poker game. "Marriages come and go, but the game has to go on," is shared philosophy. Otherwise sharing is fraught and The Odd Couple, a mildly funny comedy with some terrific one-liners, good interaction between characters, is a pleasant production for a night out at the Palace. Poker party scenes arc well-timed and a brief encounter with the two English girls upstairs (Joanne Good and Juliette Grassby) adds sparkle. But on occasions the two characters alone failed to fill the big expanse of the stage, just like Oscar's natural untidiness failed to manifest itself with the character looking quite neat and the clutter quite limited. A little air pollution in the form of occasional noisy music might have helped and fined in with the characterisation.