by Neil Simon
Directed by Stuart Hughes
A Soulpepper Production
at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts
February 19-April 19, 2008

    The one thing you shouldn’t be doing at a Neil Simon comedy is allowing your mind to wander, but that is what my mind started to do at Soulpepper’s version of The Odd Couple. I was enjoying the male buddies at their poker ritual, particularly Oliver Dennis’ Murray who fussed at arranging, smoothing, and dealing the cards as if he were most concerned about accuracy rather than speed. Derek Boyes and Michael Hanrahan under his pork-pie hat didn’t look out of place in this very New York farce, and Kevin Bundy’s sweaty, anxious Roy was very definitely in the Simon groove—so much so, in fact, that I started to wish he were playing Felix, once Diego Matamoros shambled in as the neurotically fastidious, psychologically wrung character. Matamoros entered looking rumpled, but he always looks rumpled, whether the role demands this or not, and whether he is acting in Chekhov, Gogol, or Friel. Felix Unger is described as having clenched hair, but Matamoros hardly has hair enough to be clenched. Nevertheless, this actor is quite good at physical comedy, and his odd-shaped face lends itself to a wide repertoire of expressions that run the gamut from droopy gloom to hysterical panic, but there is not much flexibility in his voice, nor is there a really yeasty sense of comic imagination in his acting. He certainly exudes emotional defeat as a man who has just been kicked out of a marriage for being incredibly impossible as a domestic partner. And he can negatively alter the mood of a room in a trice, thereby increasing the comedy of his depression. Matamoros’s Felix is not bad, but neither is it particularly good. When he takes great pride in his cooking and table settings, the actor attempts a sort of ballet with an aerosol can and assorted props for the special dinner he is preparing for himself, his buddy Oscar, and the giggly Pigeon sisters, but it is not enough to make his Felix especially memorable, something you could put in the same company as Art Carney’s or Jack Lemmon’s or Tony Randall’s incarnations of the role. His comic acting is a matter of technique compensating for temperament.

   Then there is the problem of Albert Schultz’s Oscar. Schultz has given many excellent performances in a range of roles. This time he seems to be slumming while playing a lumbering slob who, like Felix, has been kicked out of a marriage. His attempt at a New York accent is inconsistent, and his comedy looks worked out rather than spontaneous. Moreover, Schultz tries to be cuddly cute when he should really be bearish and dangerously on edge. This does nothing much for Simon’s comedy of two mismatched housemates that really depends on one person’s natural yin rubbing afoul of another’s personal yang.

   The genius of The Odd Couple is its parody of marriage in a situation where two men play strife-torn husband and wife, as it were, in a predominantly male world. Like all good comedy, it thrives on incongruity, but especially on contrasts of character, and the pace of the comedy should never flag. But flag it does in this production, principally because of the two miscast main roles and the modified hilarity produced by Krystin Pellerin and Amy Rutherford’s Pigeon sisters who are English enough but rather tame in their giggly cooing and double-entendres.

  Stuart Hughes’ direction observes all the conventions of situation comedy without trying desperately to magnify them with gimmicks, except with those in the very plot itself. The sweaty, grouchy card game yields comic dividends, as do the men’s attempts to foil Felix’s supposed attempts at suicide. Felix’s turning a potentially romantic evening with the Pigeon sisters into an almost funereal wake is also droll. However, Hughes cannot make Matamoros and Schultz multiply the comedy of disparate psychological humours. Nor can he gloss over the fact that, despite its wonderfully efficient, though difficult, mechanism, this play does show its age. Though it is still funny to see a man carrying on like a stressed housewife or one man in domestic bondage to another, this is hardly enough to put Neil Simon in the same company as Shakespeare, Congreve, Coward, or Stoppard when it comes to the comic pantheon. And this production doesn’t make a case for Simon’s promotion.  

photos: Cylla von Tiedemann

pic 1: (L-R) Albert Schultz, Diego Matamoros, Amy Rutherford, Krystin Pellerin, Albert Schultz

pic 2: (L-R) Diego Matamoros,  


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