I Heart Louie Sandys

Ryan O'Sullivan

I Heart Louie Sandys is a bit of a standout in our Shakespeare-laden theater scene: it combines ‘regular’ acting, video clips, nimble physical theatre, and that woefully underexplored medium: extremely loud shouting that rattles one’s sinuses.

The plot, however, is not as remarkable. There’s plenty of iterations around (cf. Run, Fatboy, Run): downtrodden fella (John), with a wisecracking buddy (Ben), somehow, in competition with a much more charismatic and successful man (titular Louie Sandys), gets The Girl (Nora) after several setbacks. The difference here is that there’s no eucatastrophe and his lady goes off with the non-loser option.

Unorthodox choices are the play’s strength. Two monitors on either side of centre stage played video snippets. In the clips, flashbacks occurred -- young Ben and John assaulting someone in a port-a-loo -- or scenes which would have been awkward to stage -- new couple John and Nora getting their hump on for the first time, in super sped-up footage to show perhaps ten couplings (no full frontal nudity, though). The technical team deserves many plaudits for successfully engineering this rig.

There were also interludes of vigourous physical theatre. The best was a moment of four actors onstage, an actor tipping the other three one at a time, so that they rocked back and forth like mannequins, chanting mindlessly that they liked tennis and dancing.

The play cleverly borrowed a technique seen in traditions like kabuki theatre wherein stagehands assist in special effects on stage, such as sudden costume changes, but count as invisible since they’re clad in all black. An IHLS scene where this worked particularly well had one of the actors, in black clothes and black ski mask, make a candy bar float in a slow motion and bounce from the protagonist’s clumsy hand into the eye of a hapless office assistant. In another, the (presumably same) man acted as a recalcitrant vending machine trapping a sweetie.

Unfortunately, these absorbing moments don’t add up to a coherent whole. The above mentioned interludes were exactly that, islands that didn’t contribute to the plot. Plenty of jokes cropped up here and there -- at the beginning of a job interview, John is asked whether he would care for any chocolate, and on declining is told, "But the chocolate will die if you don’t care for it." The interviewer then began a seemingly endless flight of rants about the joys of chocolate, in a speech as flabby as the aimless exchanges John and Ben have.

And while the jokes elicited laughs, they sometimes sprung from overused premises. Nora tells John that she’s in a radical new production of Hamlet, starring...a banana. What? Theatre is sometimes pretentious? You don’t say! Later on, the screens inform us that she is afraid of pirates. I thought the whole zombie/pirate/viking trend had been laid to rest, but apparently not.

The play’s main theme, most certainly, is bravery. The bravery to carry on even when your life is a string of utter failures, one right after the other. The bravery to include novel video techniques in a drama (which would have earned the play another star, but was negated by the garbled dialogue). The bravery for an actor to lurch onstage as an old lady, covered in fake excrement.

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