It is a remarkable feat that Hollywood Ending, a satirical play that riffs off the events surrounding the low-budget, poorly produced and highly incendiary film The Innocence of Muslims (uploaded to YouTube and the trigger for protests by Muslims worldwide against its blasphemous and offensive content) has been staged so soon after the events that inspired its creation. Its coherence as a piece of theatre is a credit to writer CJ Johnson and director Tim Roseman, who pioneered the ‘Rapid Write’ process to radically reduce the time-lapse between first draft and first night, allowing plays to still feel topical when they arrive on the stage.
Terry Serio is pitch-perfect as the protagonist, Don, a hapless, washed-up porn director, complete with handlebar moustache, who left his native Sydney to move to Hollywood in the 1970s, but hasn’t made a film in years, and has lapsed into an alcohol-soaked existence funded by dealing drugs. He leaps at the chance to make a ‘real movie’; unfortunately for him, this turns out to be a piece of crude anti-Muslim propaganda, written by Randy, a gun-loving, moronic caricature of the dregs of the American right wing (played to great comic effect by Blake Erickson) and kept in check by Amy (Briallen Clarke) who comports herself as a vapid blonde with a brittle smile, but who is gradually revealed as a sinister, steely Orly Taitz-like figure on a mission to get the film out in time to influence the upcoming presidential election.
The film’s shoestring budget is eroded as the play progresses, and much of the humour comes from Don and his wonderfully camp colleague Jerry (Tony Llewellyn-Jones) attempting to stretch the pitifully small pot of cash far enough to produce the film, scraping the barrel of non-unionised acting talent and relying on the tackiest of props: a pair of woolly humps represents a camel, and Don and Jerry end up shovelling sand to create a desert in the only studio that will house them, donated by a fundamentalist Christian group. Much of the action is shown in short sketch-like scenes with quick-fire changes. Set changes, often as simple as moving a couple of chairs, are effective in setting up a new location or the passage of time. Reminiscences of past glories in Don and Jerry’s porn-making career provide a lively patter, much of which is hilarious, although occasionally the succession of short scenes feels a little excessive.
There are quiet, reflective moments too, mostly between Don and Jerry, or Don and his daughter Laura (Caroline Craig), an actress who has been much more successful in Hollywood than her father, whose attempts to redeem the tatters of his career she views with scepticism. She is the voice of Don’s conscience; upon reading the script of the film she has reluctantly agreed to consider, she delivers an outraged diatribe on its inflammatory hatefulness. This is the play’s most serious moment, and its weakest: Amy’s lecturing speech recalls the disastrous soapbox-earnestness of the first episode of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom; the moral of the story has already been conveyed implicitly, and far more effectively, through humour. The following confrontation between a morally conflicted Don and the manipulative Amy, in which the latter praises his commitment to freedom of speech, and wins him over with a subtle mix of flattery and faux idealism, is much defter and less contrived.
As an evening’s entertainment, Hollywood Ending is excellent; as a contribution to the debate over free speech and hate speech, it’s pretty lightweight; but as a testament to the ‘Rapid Write’ technique, and its granting of a new lease of topical life to the theatre, it’s outstanding. Much of the manic energy of the play no doubt derives directly from the hectic process of putting a show up in such a short space of time. With this production, ‘Rapid Write’ has upped the ante, and redefined our expectations of what the theatre can accomplish.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Hollywood Ending
By CJ Johnson
Presented by Arts Radar, Theatre503 and Griffin Independent
Director: Tim Roseman
Designer: Rita Carmody
Lighting Designer: Hartley T A Kemp
Sound Designer: Steve Toulmin
Assistant Director: Dominic Mercer
Assistant Designer: Ally Mansell
With Caroline Craig, Briallen Clarke, Blake Erickson, Tony Llewellyn-Jones and Terry Serio
SBW Stables Theatre, Kings Cross
21 November – 15 December
