Cupcakes and Commiserations

There’s something too flippant about cupcakes to make them a good ingredient for a psychological thriller. Great for a comedy or a biting satire, perhaps, but not so much for theatre that’s trying to conjure up darker emotions.

In a new play written by actress Tammany Barton, Cupcakes and Commiserations, the kitchen is the main setting. It’s there that Nola (played by Barton) and her husband Frank (Danny de Bruyne) live out their scenes of less than domestic bliss.

They’re a good looking couple, she the personal assistant who usurped his first wife, and he the smooth and urbane boss. Now Frank has disappeared, and a frantic Nola is trying to track him down. The play runs the two timelines simultaneously, with flashbacks to normal married life in between the panicky Nola trying to find him.

Unfortunately that premise sounds more intriguing than the play delivers, because the content feels half-baked. Director Penny Bramwell-Jones could certainly do with stepping up the pace, or maybe cutting out a few minutes of the play completely. There’s one scene where the couple are baking cupcakes together that looks supplanted from a mid-afternoon cookery show, not a deep and disturbing psychological thriller. Their exchange of conversation and Frank’s amusing innuendoes are insufficient to maintain the audience engagement.

Barton and De Bruyne both give decent performances, but there’s not enough chemistry sparking between them. True, they’re portraying a marriage facing difficulties, but even the supposedly happy moments are stilted.

Some of the developments don’t make sense either, like why Nola would have access to recordings of police interviews with other characters. Clues for the picking up on, no doubt, but at the time it just seems like a flaw in this rather strange recipe.

Then there the voice-overs, with other characters introduced through recordings by Masasa Mbangeni, Ilanit Shapiro, Muzi Mthembu, Tanja Franzsen and Angela Sparks. Now the idea is to ramp up the tension by repeating some of the key phrases, replaying them so you question the assertations being made by Nola, and the proclamations of yes, he’s a good man and of course we were happy. It's a nice trick of theatrical shorthand for capturing her thoughts and questioning her sanity, but overdone here to the point of outright irritation.

The play certainly has an interesting twist that I didn’t see coming, but it needs a lot of work to make the journey there more appetising.

Cupcakes and Commiserations runs at Sandton’s Auto & General Theatre on the Square until September 21. Tickets from Computicket. Photos: Philip Kuhn