Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast: Roxanne Male, Jack Taylor-Wood, Natalie Romero.

Bedroom farce has always been a favourite of British audiences; it seeps out of the psyche like a cream doughnut being squeezed teasingly in the playful hands of an artist but with much embarrassed sniggering accompanying it. Bedroom farce is what passes unashamedly as the way to view the British and the habits they employ in the art of love making, lots of innuendo but the frightened reserve of a shell shocked rabbit.

In the hands of someone else, it somehow seems to lose something tangible, fun; it can become brash, perhaps even aggressively impatient to hammer the message home or hurried to make the point stick. In C.J. Ehrlich’s Room Circus a honeymooning couple is joined in the bedroom by a previous partner of the bride’s and the rampant wonderful sexuality is somehow tempered by the difficulty in which to capture sex between three people with a short lead in.

In a play with many distractions, Director Helen Kerr certainly got the most out of the cast and, was as always, a guiding light. It must be one of the hardest aspects of any theatre production to do but Ms. Kerr always takes the job in hand seriously and whilst Room Circus was unfortunately perhaps the most vulnerable in this year’s Queertet at the Unity Theatre, the direction more than made up for it.

If the thought of Grin Theatre’s Gearstick was only hindered by the wish for it to have been longer in which to explore the intriguing themes offered, then it may have struck the audience that they would have liked Room Circus to be taken further also, if only to really give the play the one thing it desperately needed which was a more deserving back story. The play also seemed to suffer slightly from the idea of it being written more of a piece that didn’t explore bi-sexuality but gave rise to a male fantasy.

Whilst Room Circus certainly had some laughs in it, this was more borne out by the very good acting relationship and trust between Roxanne Male and Natalie Romero and Helen Kerr’s direction.

A play that would benefit from further exploration for there is certainly a story to made.

Ian D. Hall