Word: woode
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...SECOND ACT seems more like the play Wood wanted to write. Art fades into reality during the first day of filming (in Ireland, with 300 Irish extras as American and British soldiers), and chaos erupts. The film troops, sleeping in tents, are restless, and there is a rumor that Bean will use real bullets in the filming. The Cockney crew members, led by the gaffer, threaten a workers' revolt against Bean-cum-Washington, but they hold together to film the British charge up Bunker Hill--hilariously staged, dummies and all. But they can't hold out, and the turncoat...
...jolly good fun, with some wonderful parody of Bunker Hill and American moviedom. But there's a bitter edge beneath the verbal byplay, a sardonic vision reminiscent of Catch-22. If Wood disrupts the humor and flow with the prolonged dispute between the workers and Bean, it's because he has a point to make. War or moviemaking is nothing but a chaotic nightmare; and while some madman director-general barks orders from a crane, several hundred lowly paid extras, be they Irish soldiers in the British Army in 1775 or Irish extras in a British movie...
...connection may seem far-fetched, but since Wood spent five years in the British army and worked on several films (including The Charge of the Light Brigade), I'll take his word for it. Thus the best moment in Act Two is a poignant intermezzo where on a darkened stage, the makeup girl swabs blood off fallen extras to the strains of a soldier's ballad. If there's anything funny about this, it is the cynical vision of a survivor who sees it all as a black farce. As Wood writes in the program notes, "there is something that...
...cussedness" we get plenty--a freewheeling assortment of burlesque gags and visual stunts. Wood grew up in the world of British music halls, and the influence appears in his predilection for puns, wordplay, and sexual humor (men in drag and a woman, Mary Jane Pendejo--played by Karen MacDonald--as Major Trumbull). This is wonderful entertainment, but it's going nowhere; Wood's view of moviedom--war as a ribald chaos prevents the play from establishing any dramatic focus or momentum, and the act lapses into a number of extraneous routines. It remains a wild burlesque with some high points...
...have a delightful second-act coda with Thomas Derrah delivering a voice-over of a soldier's death for a sequence of the movie. This helps to lessen the play's claim to seriousness and lets it stand as glorified burlesque. Kustow's direction throughout is faithful to Wood's music-hall style, with an unending series of visual gags and (with some noticeable gaps) a fast-paced verbal attack--much of it funny, much of it silly. If you've seen enough Morecambe and Wise or Monty Python, you'll recognize it quickly enough...