MARK FISHER finds that Benchtours’ production doesn’t quite pull off its promising satirical start.

WE’RE IN some unspecified Eastern European state where the new regime is finding it difficult to persuade the people that it’s an improvement on the old regime. Business is sluggish in the capital’s main hotel but the secretary of culture and identity has hatched a scheme to transform everyone’s fortunes.

He claims to have discovered a lost opera, the only one this small nation has ever produced. Instantly the hotel is animated with the prospect of a boom in cultural tourism. Then come the Chinese whispers.

Michael Duke’s play for Benchtours kicks off with promising satirical purpose. Like Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit and Douglas Maxwell’s If Destroyed True – both seen recently at Dundee Rep – The Emperor’s Opera makes fun of the idea of a small town or country trying to reinvent itself for the benefit of the outside world.

The dilemma is experienced everywhere – whether it’s a newly independent ex-Soviet state struggling to find its voice or some godforsaken Scottish town left behind by the capitalist machine. There is something comical in the idea that culture, real or imagined, might be the solution.

The play, however, gets side-tracked. Duke has chosen to write a farce, one of the most difficult dramatic forms, and although he sets the characters off in the right direction – duly wound-up like springs – and although the actors in Peter Clerke’s production work tirelessly, the result is laboured and rarely funny.

For farce to work we have to believe the stakes are high and that each new action makes matters more precarious for the protagonist. Although the secretary’s initial lie gets out of hand as his fictitious opera is talked up into a masterwork that “goes to the heart of our current crisis”, he doesn’t have much more to lose at the end than at the beginning. At any point, he could confess and it wouldn’t make much difference.

What is more, Duke expends so much energy pursuing the relentless logic of the plot – with its Whitehall-style extra-marital affairs and a vaguely Ortoneque corpse in the cupboard – that he neglects the satire. Perhaps if the opera had been forced into life, instead of exposed as a lie, the play could have pursued the Emperor’s New Clothes theme suggested by the title and opened up more comic and satirical mileage.

Without this, it’s a play going nowhere fast, a feeling emphasised by the deeply unsatisfying ending in which the whole thing is simply blown up.

© Mark Fisher, 2005