As someone who has worked in conflict mediation between cohabiting individuals, I was eagerly looking forward to seeing Trapped Wind Productions’ “Housemates – The Sitcom”. My time spent in this field exposed me to the good, the bad and the ugly of individuals sharing a living space and the comedic possibilities seemed endless. As reality television has shown us time and time again, what is more funny than pushing a load of relative strangers into a confined space and watching them turn on each other?
“Housemates – The Sitcom” follows four housemates of varying social backgrounds over a weekend in which one occupant moves out and another moves in. Split in two halves, each segment of the piece is similar in style and length to a television sitcom. Fundamentally, the piece is unsuccessful through its sitcom premise.
The first part of this portmanteau stands for “situation”. As someone who has both lived in various houseshares and has worked with people struggling in such a set up, the situations on which this play is based are shallow, random and have no basis in truth whatsoever. I’m sure that nobody was expecting a humorous docu-realist portrayal of people living together. However, comedy needs to have some grounding in reality in order to provide laughs, especially when dealing with a subject that is as true-to-life as the fundamentals of cohabitation.
The two-dimensional characters have not been credited with so much as an ounce of nuance and effectively blurt their life stories to each other as soon as they walk onto the stage. There’s the ‘sensible one’, the ‘everyday bloke one’, the ‘irreverent older woman one’, the ’crazy young guy one’ and the ‘nice but dim one’. Far from being a criticism of the banal types found in many sitcoms, this play appears to simply kowtow to the worst aspects of its generic forbearers.
The second part of the sitcom portmanteau means “comedy”. This is a major problem for “Housemates – The Sitcom” as it is desperately unfunny. Whilst there are clearly attempts at humour throughout, most were greeted with a mere spluttering of acknowledgement from the fairly packed audience. Many of the punch lines were cringeworthy in their predictability and the players themselves often seemed embarrassed to be delivering them.
Rushed and with little acknowledgment for conventional and sensible narrative structures, the piece is stifled by failing to note the difference between televisual and theatrical forms. Whereas the TV sitcom can utilise a great number of short scenes through the transition of the quick cut, the regularity of scene changes in this piece broke the flow. It seemed like there was a thirty second scene change after every three minute scene and this quickly became irksome and monotonous. Whilst some of the performances were passable, no amount of good acting could save this piece from its awful script.
Overall, “Housemates – The Sitcom” is a tedious experience shared with irritating individuals. Ironically, this is much like inhabiting a houseshare itself. Stay at home.
