Claptrap

David E. Kemp, a former drama professor at Queen’s University, is the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Tom Wood is an actor, playwright, and director who has worked with every
major regional theatre in Canada. Wood’s B-Movie: The Play, a farce
about our obsession with movies, won the Chalmers Award for Best New
Play, as well as five Dora Mavor Moore Awards. Claptrap seems destined
to repeat that success.

Like Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, Claptrap gives the audience a view
of backstage as well as onstage events. But whereas Frayn focuses on one
play, Wood presents us with glimpses of a complete season as staged by
the fictional Ibsen Festival (or “Ibfest,” as it is popularly known)
in Oslo, Ontario. On view are an unknown commedia dell’arte play, a
Restoration masterpiece, a Gilbert and Sullivan spoof called The Raj (in
which a couple of British Imperialists ride an elephant while singing,
“We’re blonde, British and just a little bit blasé”), an offstage
Greek chorus, an unknown early work by Ibsen, and Frozen Wheat, a
hilarious compendium of clichés from the factually based Canadian
Collective. Among the characters are the artistic director—a
vindictive, psychotic British mediocrity who believes he’s wasted his
life in the colonies teaching the natives the rudiments of English
theatre; the leading lady, who is attempting a stage comeback after a
failed marriage; a vacuous American “star” performer; an elderly
oversexed character player; and an actress with a drinking problem.

Staging Claptrap would require considerable ingenuity and resources,
but it would be well worth the effort.