Review: Secondary Cause of Death by Sam Bass Community Theatre
by Michael Meigs
The Sam Bass players put their energy and ingenuity into Peter Gordon’s Secondary Cause of Death and I did get some smiles from it. The Round Rock thespian crew under Lynn Beaver's direction were performing the equivalent of CPR on a piece that probably should have been selected for unfavorable triage at a much earlier date.
With this play the British playwright wrote the second in his “Inspector Pratt” trilogy, a follow-up to his Murdered to Death, done successfully last year at the Sam Bass Community Theatre. That was a parody of the never-out-of-print-and-ever-popular Agatha Christie’s “Miss Marple” series of detective stories. In addition to “Miss Joan Maple” played by Veronica Prior, the murder-in-the-mansion story featured Frank Benge as Inspector Pratt ( = in British slang, “idiot”), a sort of looming English version of Inspector Clouseau. Richard Dodwell was the old chap retired colonel from India. That play wound up in the classic confrontation in the drawing room, during which (spoiler alert!) Miss Maple herself was revealed to be the culprit and the colonel’s good wife went off to the loony bin.
Peter Gordon doesn’t manage the hurdle. For this Murdered to Death II he brings back Inspector Pratt and Frank Benge faithfully recreates the man’s confusion, mistakes with personal names, dim reasoning and enormous presence. So far, so good. But Gordon is at a loss without Miss Marple – “Maple” in his parody – who was sent to gaol long-term in the previous piece. So he dreams up “Cynthia Maple,” sister of the imprisoned, whose specialty is setting up pretend murder mysteries in private homes for weekends in the country. Gordon wants to eat his cake and have it, too. Although in this avatar Veronica Prior is earnest, well dressed and distressed, the device is clunky. All the more so as pretend murders are replaced by real murders, taken for laughs.
The show could have survived all that, but on top of that creaky structure Gordon loads a Polish count (excuse the spoiler or stop reading here) who is revealed to be a walking, stalking, foaming-at-the-mouth secret Nazi of the very worst panto stripe. Ben Weaver always has an electric presence on stage and his cleverness with accents is astounding (tell me, could you successfully imitate a thick-tongued Nazi successfully imitating the elegant accent of faded Polish aristocracy?). But oh my God, we get a Nazi strut suddenly possessing the man like a demon from hell, quickly explained away as the Pole’s German joke.
The set by Kevin Scholtes is superbly imagined and executed, and costumes designed by Ronni Prior are sumptuous. I would kill -- almost -- for that two-breasted suit Ben Weaver was wearing, and I'm sure there would be takers for Lady Isadora's elegant red dress with the red-and-black feather boa. Those 1939-era uniforms look as if they came straight out the wardrobe at Shepperton Studios.
Round Rock is lucky to have the dedicated, hard-working and almost always successful Sam Bass band of friends and artists, and they deserve support. If you’re familiar with the Sam Bass theatre, by all means, turn out and smile. If you’re not, well, wait until next time; Peter Gordon’s Secondary Cause of Death isn’t an example of their best.
An enthusiastic, unsigned review at AustinOnStage, October 6
Click to view program excerpts for Secondary Cause of Death by Sam Bass Community Theatre
Click for cast bios from program
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Secondary Cause of Death
by Peter Gordon
Sam Bass Theatre Association
