2008: The Queen of Bingo by Jeanne Michels and Phyllis Murphy

The Queen of Bingo by Jeanne Michels and Phyllis Murphy.  The Australian premiere tour, directed by Helen Ellis, at Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, September 24-28, 8pm. Bookings: 6298 0290   

Professional actors will do whatever it takes to make a weak script look good.  Fortunately Evelyn Krape and Kelly Nash work very hard and succeed in making The Queen of Bingo watchable, if not nearly as funny as its review in Grand Rapids, USA, suggests.  “Witty, wry and outrageous” it is not, despite every effort especially by Nash, as the larger of two sisters, to expand Babe’s rage at her failure to lose weight and so be able to accept the footie coach’s invitation to the Best and Fairest Ball. Krape, as the older and slimmer Sis, makes some remarkable gyrating movements to turn Babe’s self-loathing around, and to entertain us. 

But in the end the writing depends too much on cheap jibes at invisible characters off-stage, who can’t answer back, and on artificial devices, like coming up with bingo, for which there can be no dramatic justification.  It’s a neat way of bringing to an end a play which otherwise might have dragged on as long as a real bingo night.

A major fault was to translate this quintessentially American play into a broad Australian accent, including idiomatic phrases and iconic local references.  The bingo calls like “under B, eleven”, for example, do not have the ring of the British-Australian tradition, which would be “Legs eleven”, with all the sexual innuendo which could make the script smuttier and probably funnier. I’m not sure, either, that “housie” as it was played here in the Catholic church context is as dominant as it once was when it was the butt of jokes about Catholics by the straight-laced Protestants.  It might have been better to have played the text in its original American accents, allowing us at least to laugh at Americans rather than at Catholics and fat people.

Oddly enough, the most engaging part was played by Keith Hutton, who, as the Irish-accented Father Mac, played real bingo with us just before interval and someone won a real frozen turkey. I think the New York Village Voice got it right, calling The Queen of Bingo “silliness and a frozen turkey....”

©Frank McKone, Canberra