A Fool in Love (Sydney Theatre Co) ★★★

Written by Van Badham after “La dama boba” by Lope de Vega. Sydney Theatre Company. 6 Feb – 17 Mar, 2024

There’s putting a hat on a hat, and then there’s A Fool in Love – the new comedy that gets so engrossed in its maximalist approach it threatens to lose itself completely. To quote the great poet/philosopher of our age, Taylor Swift, “You need to calm down”.

Van Badham has taken the 17th century Spanish comedy La dama boba and brought it to modern day Australia and the fictional seaside town of Byron Bay, oh sorry, I mean Illescas. Here the two beautiful Otavio sisters, the pretentious & gorgeous poet Vanessa (Melissa Kahraman, Hubris & Humiliation), and her impossibly stupid sister Phynayah (Contessa Treffone, On the Beach), live at home. For all the family’s apparent wealth however, things aren’t going well, and their best chance at rescue comes in the form of a rich, eccentric uncle who has left his fortune to Phynayah on one condition… she must get engaged before she turns 30. As the deadline approaches, her father Otto (Johnny Nasser) desperately throws suitors at her, but her dim-witted ways scare them all off. However, when working class uni student Laurie (Arkia Ashraf) tries his hand he finds her oddly charming and, in a strange way, intellectually stimulating… and maybe she starts to feel the same way.

Badham’s script manages to be smart, complex and funny which is no small feat. The laughs come thick and fast like a boxing match, high-brow humour is quickly followed by low-brow jabs as jokes about German philosophy sit next to jokes about fisting by the bins.

Woven into the fabric of the plot is the kind of commentary on money, class, education and gender you’d expect from the beloved Guardian columnist. As a writer who speaks fluent over-educated left-wing activist as well as fluent bogan, her characters play with your prejudices and poke fun at everyone around them – most notably the rich, the private school educated and the art-loving liberal elites who happen to be in the audience. Badham has taken a predictable, sexist farce and turned it around into a modern, politically aware comedy. It’s the kind of script I’d love to sit down and read because I’m sure I lost half the lines as they were uttered too quickly (more on that later) and because I might need an annotated version to bring me up to speed.

On the stage, director Kenneth Moraleda and designer Isabel Hudson have released a fever dream of Escher-in-Barbieland. The set is a bright pink. There are shimmering blue metallic curtains. There are neon lights around the stage and bright yellow ladders. There’s a “wacky races” chase sequence timed to a needle drop. There are giant oranges and a storm cloud that yells “thunder” instead of using a sound effect of thunder. It’s a lot. It’s a whole lot. 

In the midst of this, the actors are reduced to over-the-top “silly acting” and one-note shouting of their lines. For the most part, these aren’t characters, they’re just 2D caricatures in brightly-coloured outfits. It’s hard to appreciate the jokes, when it all becomes a wall of undifferentiated noise.

For all this raging sea of ‘com’ there is precious little ‘rom’ to grasp hold of. You feel more for the exasperated yoga teacher than for the romantic leads. Which isn’t to say the performances are bad in any way, but there is a case of diminishing returns with a number of comedy players giving us identical performances as they did the last few times they were on the STC stage. The production is so desperate to make you laugh, it never lets you stop and care for the characters. And with a running time of over two and half hours… It’s exhausting. That’s way too long for a modern comedy.

I knew the play had started to lose me when my brain started picking at little things. The script mentions that Lee (Aaron Tsindos) has really good arms… that we just couldn’t see thanks to his loose shirt and jacket. Otto complains about being lost in the tastefully white interior of his home… when all we can see in an expanse of shocking pink. The script and staging seemed to be at odds with one another. And I’m not even going to get into the token “gay romance” subplot that… nope, I’m not going there.

It’s frustrating because I really like the script (except for the self-referential jokes that came across as smug), and I really like the cast. I even really liked the gaudy set. But A Fool in Love lacked the necessary clarity of storytelling to truly land. You’ll laugh for sure, but it lacks the freshness and unbridled joy of previous STC comedies like Hubris and Humiliation or Blithe Spirit.