Freddy licks Puss

Who remembers Puss? With politics taking a turn towards democracy, the dark days of despotism being over seems to have edged Chaminda Pusswedilla and his dictatorial political patron off centre stage. With it, we thought Feroze Kamardeen’s days as an impresario were over… it was, as they say, a mission impossible.

Well, we were wrong. FK staged a dramatic – OK, melodramatic – comeback over the weekend just past… and it began to the familiar OST from the old ‘Mission Impossible’ TV series. (Tut-tut, tut-tut, tut-tut, tut-tut, ta-da-ra!) His vehicle was not Puss… but a new oeuvre: Freddy – and what a jolly good egg this turned out to be.

First, kudos to Kamardeen for starting punctually at 7:30 p.m. on the dot. Time is money, as the actress said to the bishop. It is also cancelled dinner reservations and life bleeding away slowly at every tick of the clock if and when FK’s plays goes over three hours – which they usually do! 

But Feroze took an uncharacteristic turn up front at the mic as soon as the curtain went up to explain his rationale. In his inimitable I’m-a-showman-so-you-can-stuff-yours-up-your-unsunshiny-place way. Of course, we suspect it was a canny strategy to let latecomers in under cover of his rapid self-deprecating patter, courtesy of a rainy night’s traffic and construction-constructed parking which conspired against the punctilious theatregoer three nights in a row. Pity that people kept tricking in as late as 8.04 p.m. on opening night. Minor quibbles these. What followed cleared the air of annoyed seated folks’ bald invective: “What the Freddy! Where the Freddy do you think you’re going? Get the Freddy off my toes, lap, etc.”

Second, hats off to FK for rounding up a stellar cast. Not only big names in terms of well-known actors, but nuanced acting from a small but shiny panoply of players. Funny Money aficionado Mohamed Adamaly (Adam, to many or most) was right on the money with a Loftus or Lancelot Spratt-like doctor whose words got stuck halfway out of his thorax – and had to be hilariously rescued by a blonde-nursed Dominic Kellar in one short segment. 

Dom himself (Puss in a previous incarnation) was an edgy enneagram number 8 (oh, look it up) mar-com exec in another, and went on to take many turns and thrusts – literally – in a series of other skits. 

Dino Corera played straight man in the main with a poker face at the shenanigans of his fellow players, and came into his own as a Basil Fawlty-type waiter, albeit in Nazi garb. In a cross section of offerings, Sean Amerasekara demonstrated his range of voice, mood, mannerism, and body language; but it was his interpretation of a bleary-eyed weed-smoking prophet of peace and prosperity that had this spectator in stitches.

Third, congratulations again to FK for discovering or inventing a new vehicle for satire and sociopolitical commentary. In the first half of the show, the witty scripts succeeded in exposing the daylight robbery propagated on their customers by criminally exploitative banks (a surfeit of rules and regulations, hidden taxes, a plethora levies on value-added services, etc., on top of crippling bureaucracy) among other venerable institutions. 

The posturing of posh eateries was dissected in a scene reminiscent of Fawlty Towers in which a pair of Teutonic restaurateurs reduces a diner complaining about a fly in his soup to a gibbering wreck. Adam as the quintessential politician pricked the conscience as well as chagrin of Colombo-based audiences by suavely reflecting on how and why people’s representatives “don’t give a Freddy” (the word used was not ‘Freddy’ but started with an F all the same…). 

Included in the lampooning were incompetent hospitals which dismember their otherwise healthy patients, newfangled pseudo-religious movements which promise health and wealth at the cost of ready cash or flexible credit card, and shamelessly manipulative advertising gimmickry. Where Puss punctured power and politics, Freddy fingered the flops, flubs, failures, and fiascoes of the society of which we are all a complicit part…

Which brings me to Freddy. In a masterstroke of theatrical suspense, Freddy never actually features in the production. In each of the amusing segments, he is mysteriously missing in action – mentioned off-hand, often so minor a player that the eponymous play becomes a comment on our appetite for celebrities. Who is Freddy? What is Freddy? Where the F is he? 

FK also indulges his melodramatic daemon quite a bit, suspiciously manufacturing a cannily contrived scene in which a Delta Force team takes down a bin Laden-like target – just so that the playwright can smuggle in the phrase “grab that pussy”! Egregious, but vastly amusing and entertaining.

Once upon a time in Sri Lanka, when we were fighting a bloody and brutal civil war, I’d have eschewed brews such as this concoction for being ersatz – when the real thing we needed at the time was Politically Undermining and Socially Subversive (PUSS) theatre. Puss was not quite PUSS, in this sense, but it served a semi-demi-satirical purpose in pricking the conscience of the king… And now that we’re slowly transforming from a post-war to a post-conflict society, we can all “sit back, relax, and enjoy the show”… So bring on the dancing girls! (Which reminds me: any mega-church would get a good bang for their buck if they hired Dino, Dom, and Daminda Wijeratne – the latter superbly diffident as a confused and bullied bank robber – to be their back-up singers!)

Last but not least, a feather in FK’s cap for introducing stand-up to mainstream theatregoing. Dominic Kelaart – sorry, Kellar! – was his usual hoot and then six; mischievously making Sri Lankan names so much fun to say. Move over, Russell Peters! Gehan Blok was a revelation, taking us gigglingly back to the boot camp of school days… And playfully making himself the butt-end (literally) of some rib-tickling tomfoolery. Move again again, Russell Peters!

Freddy was a night of unabashed fun. Puss may have hung up his pseudo-satirical hat, but thankfully FK has not thrown in the towel. What the FK?