‘Maximum bloodshed on a budget’Johannes Hjorth

The Wives of Others, the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club’s offering to the Fringe this year, is sort of like a bottle episode from a classic Italian-American gangster series: maximum bloodshed on a budget. The production depended upon a sparse and functional set for a play which largely stuck to the action unfolding within one room; a tableful of mob wives sit down for dinner and betray each other until there’s only one woman left standing (Angie, played by Emma Blacklay-Piech, who was distractingly good throughout). The play is a real treat if you’re someone who buys into the whole ‘each deceit is an even more treacherous deceit than the last deceit and everyone gradually dies’ thing. My mother raised me on a diet of Poirot and Midsummer Murders so I was grinning from the outset, cheque in hand – but that’s just me. In Tarantino-esque style, the dialogue is more important than the plot, which others watching it with me found to be a bit silly.

The performance itself was delivered with extraordinary charm. It’s a real credit to the directing team (Rebecca Cusack and Rebecca Thomas) that, amid the gun shots, every second of action was carefully wrung dry for its comedic potential – a feat carried off by what is surely a selection of the best female acting talent in Cambridge at the moment. Olivia Gaunt exemplified this, her part – the much maligned Mary – didn’t have the funniest lines but her delivery was spot on; she said “yes” at one point and everyone was in hysterics. The cast stuck to their New York accents impressively well.   

Now if you don’t mind handing me that soap box for one second, I would like to say that it was a joy to see an all-female cast at the Fringe (that wasn’t an a cappella group, there was enough a cappella), especially a female cast so alive to the comedic potential of this rather bloody play. It felt good to see ovaries getting ovations after a month of male-dominated comedy/drama.

Sometimes the monologues fell a little flat in comparison to the enormous energy of the ensemble work but Julia Kass (Frankie) did exceedingly well in her last scenes to create much of the emotional gravitas of the ending. The cast were somewhat let down by the lack of period appropriate costume and occasionally by the set/staging: the use of upstage to represent ‘outside’ the house meant that when the table fell forward half the audience lost the action occurring right at the front of the stage. But these are small quibbles. I would conclude, along with the people I saw this play with, that this was certainly one of the best pieces of student drama available at the Fringe this year.