“There goes the security deposit.”
Lily looks at the bloodied, rolled up carpet on her apartment floor while Phil pants desperately, wielding a baseball bat.
If you have a taste for black comedy and physical humour and don’t get squeamish at the sight of blood, then Fairly Lucid Productions’ ‘Raton Laveur’ is well worth a look.
Aussie couple Phil (Ben Noble) and Lily (Wendy Bos) have just moved to Canada. Lily is building a successful career in advertising while Phil is just managing as a waiter in a creperie. It is at work that Phil’s obsession with raccoons begins. He believes he is being stalked by the leader of a raccoon pack – the Raccoon king – the ‘raton laveur’ (French for raccoon), whose ‘dexterous little hands’ are sifting through his rubbish.
Phil, whose insecure immaturity is captured brilliantly by Noble, is no stranger to obsessions – a raccoon stalker being his latest. After finding out the average male loses 50 to 100 hairs a day, he started collecting every single hair that left his head to make sure he was in the average range.
One night Phil’s obsession with the Raccoon king takes a deadly turn and he is left bloodied and bruised with a covered corpse in his living room. He calls Lily, and begs her to return home. Lily returns to help Phil clean up the blood and decide what to do next. As Lily and Phil struggle to dispose of the body, the cracks in their relationship begin to show. Phil’s insecurity is overwhelming to Lily, who is clearly the one holding the relationship together.
At only 60 minutes, the show is packed with lots of humour and one-liners, extracting many chuckles from the audience. The set is minimalist: a few bloodied cardboard boxes on the Bakehouse theatre’s intimate main stage used for Phil’s anti-raccoon barricade. Lighting is used well to highlight the emotional up and downs of the play, including a sombre ending. Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’ is ironically used at the start and end of this gory hour.
Noble and Bos have brilliant chemistry and comic timing and make a wonderful odd couple. Phil is needy, insecure and ultimately homicidal, while Lily is cool, calm and composed. Despite their differing personality traits, there are a few affectionate moments in the midst of the surrounding chaos.
The promo for ‘Raton Laveur’ warns of mature adult elements and graphic violence and rightly so. Once again, if blood isn’t your thing, you may have trouble stomaching this engaging black comedy. While it won’t appeal to everyone’s tastes, ‘Raton Laveur’ is a wonderful piece of theatre with two upstanding performances.
‘Raton Laveur’ is showing at the Bakehouse theatre until March 17.
