Saturday 8th June – Saturday 22nd June 2013 – Garter Lane Waterford
All preview tickets €10 Sat 8 & Mon 10 Jun, also Mon 17 Jun
On the Razzle by Tom Stoppard
When their boss goes out of town for the day, two country grocery store clerks close up shop and escape to the big city of Vienna for an adventure they won’t soon forget! On the Razzle, directed by Jim Nolan and with a cast of over 30 of Waterford’s finest actors, is a fast-paced farce complete with slapstick shenanigans, mistaken identities, misdirected orders and romantic complications all combined with trademark Tom Stoppard wit and wordplay. Stoppard is an award-winning author whose other smash hits include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound and the Oscar-winning screenplay, Shakespeare in Love.
“Why do I have a sense of impending disaster?” Herr Zangler, a linguistically challenged successful greengrocer in suburban Vienna, muses halfway through the first scene. He’s about to go into town to wine and dine a wealthy widowed milliner, Madame Knorr, while packing off his ward and niece Marie to his sister-in-law, Miss Blumenblatt, to prevent her from eloping with an impoverished gentlemen, Sonders. Little does he know that his chief clerk, Weinberl, and apprentice, Christopher, are going to close up shop for a day of adventure on the town, that his niece is wearing a Scottish outfit on precisely the day that everyone in Vienna is in the grips of a Macbeth-and-Sir-Walter-Scott-inspired highland fashion craze, and that all these people, along with his fiancee’s widowed friend, Frau Fischer, his newly hired servant, Melchior, and various waiters, policemen and servants, including a rump-obsessed coachman, will end up, in various disguises, tartans and states of dress and undress in the same fashionable restaurant. “One false move,” Zangler concludes, “and we’ll have a farce on our hands.”
This promises to be the theatrical highlight of 2013, supported by the Arts Council and Waterford City Council.
Time: 8.00 pm
All enquiries to Garter Lane Box Office 051 855038