‘The Mystery of Irma Vep’ is a boisterous, campy romp

David Begelman

If you’re looking for the highest reaches of dramatic art in the Charles Ludlam spoof “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” you’ll be disappointed. What you’ll get is hardly unforgettable playwriting, but rather a madcap pastiche of deliriously funny moments of contrivance and situational twists that tickle the funny bone to the max.

Shakespeare and Company, a group of performers that has distinguished itself for delivering such well appointed comedies as Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound” and “Rough Crossing,” and Georges Feydeau’s “The Ladies Man” has mounted yet another wildly funny show. The Ludlam farce, while a notch below the playwriting of those other venerable vehicles, is nonetheless a bundle of belly laughs in its own right.

Ludlam has crafted a farce in which two actors perform eight different roles. The playwright insisted that both performers should be of the same sex as a precondition of production. This ensures that cross-dressing is yet another component in this face-paced comedy of zany circumstance that has audiences in various states of hilarity —when not rolling in the aisles.

“Irma Vep” would tax the resources of any two performers. It is virtually bursting with rapid costume changes, piped-in melodramatic musical cues, sundry special effects, dialogue full of double entendres, wisecracks, props like wolf carcasses, sliding bookcases, and dialogue suddenly interspersed with words filched from—of all things—Macbeth and Hamlet.

Ludlum’s madcap comedy was first produced by the Ludlum Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and opened Off-Off Broadway in Greenwich Village in 1984. Closing almost two years later, in 1991, it became the most produced American play, and the longest running one ever produced in Brazil, South America.

The comedy opens in Mandacrest, the estate of Lord Edgar (Ryan Winkle) and Lady Enid, Edgar’s second wife (Josh Aaron McCabe). The latter, who toddles across the stage in mincing steps, lives in the shadow of Edgar’s former wife, Irma, whose portrait hangs ominously above the fireplace in the spacious parlor of the estate.

The action takes off in a series of scenes involving “ungodly nights” of fog-laced, moonlit ambience, werewolves, vampires, traduced characters who are quick to observe that they “feel the green fairy’s fang,” a portrait that begins to bleed when hit by a bullet accidentally discharged from a gun, and a household maid who elects to cheer things up by serving a sumptuous breakfast of “kippers and kidneys.” 

There is even an excursion to an Egyptian tomb where Lord Edgar hopes to unravel the mystery of Mandacrest by investigating the sarcophagus of a mummy in an unexcavated tomb—courtesy of a conniving Arab with an eye patch all too eager to cut a self-serving deal.

Winkles and McCabe tear up the scenery in episodic grandeur, to the considerable enjoyment of the audience. The dialogue is bursting with allusions to themes in Victorian novels, Agatha Christie mysteries, gothic invention, Shakespeare, horror flicks, Alfred Hitchcock, and every cliché imaginable. (McCabe as an improbable character, the hunched-over Nicodemus, has an accent that is too Boris Karloff to be accidental.)

The show is a delightful spoof of much you have seen or read about in stories that keep you young, albeit shivering at night between the sheets. Moreover, it is delivered by two seasoned troupers that are a pleasure to watch doing their breathless thing.

“The Mystery of Irma Vep” runs until March 27 at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, Mass. Performances are Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Tickets are $12-$48, and can be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353, or contacting www.shakespeare.org,