Fawlty Towers meets Fred Dag in Auckland Theatre Company’s revival of the kiwi retro classic WELL HUNG, which opens the 2011 season on February 10 at the Maidment Theatre.
Robert Lord was the first Kiwi playwright to successfully cater to a local audience’s appetite for comedies that satirised recognisable New Zealand stereotypes and events.
Starring Pua Magasiva, Adam Gardiner, Dena Kennedy and Simon Ferry as the feisty inhabitants a small rural town shaken by a double murder in the midst of the Blossom Festival, WELL HUNG pokes fun at bungled police procedures.
All hell breaks loose when a media hungry big city detective (Carl Bland) arrives determined to solve the case.
It should be pure and simple. Everyone in town knows Wally did it. But life at the local cop-shop is seldom pure and never simple.
Trev, the junior constable, has got himself in a mess with Lynette, the sergeant’s wife, and the doyenne of the local Drama Society has her eye on Detective Sharp as she snoops around for material to use in her new crime thriller.
With mistaken identities, police cock-ups and more broom-cupboard action than Boris Becker could dream of, WELL HUNG is deliciously funny, furious, farcical Kiwi comedy at its best.
“This heartland farce is a forgotten gem of Kiwi playwrighting. The unsolved murder of Jeannette and Harvey Crewe was the impulse for WELL HUNG — but Lord delights in satirising people who think they’re totally in control of a situation but in reality are thoroughly incompetent,” says Colin McColl, Auckland Theatre Company’s artistic director.
“It's Ortonesque, sexy, “irreverent and very, very funny” says McColl.
