Last weekend the Undergraduate Theatre Collective continued its semester-long showcase of Tom Stoppard with Hillel Theater Group's performance of The Real Inspector Hound. The group also performed Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy. Both shows played off of conventional theatrical notions. Stoppard's play lambastes self-involved critics and mocks English country-house weekend mysteries while Staffer's expands on a theme in Peking Opera, interchanging dark for light and vice versa.

The night opened with Stoppard as Andrew Davies '06 came walking through the auditorium looking for his seat. Davies, along with Joshua Louis Simon '07, played a theatre critic who became more than just an onlooker. The rest of the cast acted out on stage a stereotypical English murder mystery show, complete with a deceased body on stage behind them. The cast was hilariously over the top, lampooning the genre with hyper-melodrama and grand gestures. Rachel Boyarsky '06, who played Cynthia Muldoon, epitomized this with her grand gestures as three men fought over her.

The first show left me in stitches. Stoppard's witty dialogue, which HTP showed can be very hard to deliver, and twisted endings kept the show very interesting. The pacing that director Sonia Gecker '06 used for the actors who were performing the show within the show was excellent. The script that read like a satirical Agatha Christie story was made all the more hysterical by the performers delivery.

Even the actors movements and blocking were funny. Rebecca Kotlicky '06, who has maybe a dozen lines in the entire show, was hilarious as she floated across the stage with broad sweeping motions.

While overall the first show was great, not enough attention was paid to the two actors playing the critics planted within the audience, who were both essential to the plot. They were overshadowed by the play they were watching and a lot of important plot information about Poteridge and the significance of the Real McCoy was lost in the side dialogue and monologues that they had.

Shaffer's Black Comedy was equally as funny. The show, which takes place during a lit blackout, is a comedic tour de force combining both witty dialogue and great physical comedy to fully engage the audience. The show centers on Brindsley Miller, played by David Klasko '07, who is trying to meet his fiancs father and sell his sculptures at the same time when there is a power failure.

Miller's night completely goes to hell when his ex-girlfriend Clea, played by the devastatingly beautiful Jessa Saidel '07, shows up to spoil his evening. The hysteria continues, as Miller has to get all of the furniture out of the flat and into that of his neighbor Harold Gorringe, played by Adam Curley '07.

The physical comedy in the show was utterly brilliant: Klasko falls down all the time, Kotlicky is drunk and delirious for a very large portion of the show, Simon's characters mannerisms are a cross between Yosemite Sam and Major Dad and Boyarsky is flitting around stage popping her voice. There is enough visual comedy that you don't even really need dialogue; all you have to do is watch them literally and figuratively trip over themselves.

The one aspect that bothered me about the show, (which there is nothing you can do about) is its running time. The show was very funny, but an hour and 45 minutes on top of an hour-long opening show makes for a three-hour night. That's fine in some cases, but with physical comedy the more concise the better. How many times can Klasko get screwed over in one evening? And while there were parts in the later scenes that were very funny-like Curley's response to the discovery that Klasko is not gay and Kotlicky's drunken monologue- they were all just expository dialogue. Their deletion could have shortened the play. Perhaps, in the West End of London audiences are more adept to handle three-hour shows, but I felt like I was watching Winters Tale by about 10:15 p.m.

Black Comedy was quite good and probably the best show the UTC has put on this semester. The show was just clean and very smoothly executed. The lights were crisp. The costumes worked. The sound was on time. The tech was good, and while the set was a little uninspired, That's not really important here. Sure there were a few little things-like no English man would care about the Chicago Blackhawks and Crown Royal is an amber color instead of clear-but overall the show was very clean.