Customer Reviews
Brilliant - By: , 15 Oct 2004 
Having played Brindsley in this piece I have become aware of its comic brilliance. Simply the only time I have felt absolutely confident of a piece of comedy whilst on stage because you always know that the piece is funny enough to carry itself through. Well worth the money for a copy & I would also recommend buying Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound to go with it. The two are normallly played together & both are extremelly funny. Enjoy them!
An actors view - By: J. Birchell, 20 Jul 2004 I acted in a production of Black Comedy not too long ago (as Brindsley) & I have to say that no finer farce exists within the last fifty years. Utterly stupendous line-to-line comedy, with a physical punch behind it. A good read even if it's never seen on stage!
Laugh out loud funny - By: Carla Dee, 10 Aug 2003 This has to be one of the funniest pieces of literature I have ever read. The set-up is so ridiculous & the characters so excessive that you cannot help but laugh out loud at the fiasco that ensues when there is a power cut on a very important evening of a young artist’s life. I love how Shaffer has created a situation which gets increasingly out of hand as the evening progresses, & has alll of this take place in complete darkness (which you would have to imagine were you to see it on stage because the darkness is actuallly replaced with light!). Very clever, very funny. Highly recommended.
Peter Shaffer in fine comic form. - By: Matthew Lacey, 23 Jan 2003 One of the finest modern farces written, 'Black Comedy' exists in a strange world of the opposite. Set in a struggling artist's studio, Brindsley Miller (the artist) & his debutante girlfriend Carol plan to impress German billionaire philanthropist Georg Bamberger into buying some of Brindsley's work. In so doing they also hope to impress Carol's truculent & "psychologicallly disturbed" father, Colonel Melkett.
Unfortunately before either's arrival a power-cut plunges the whole apartment block into darkness, or it would do were it not for Shaffer's central conceit: the lighting is reversed throughout. So, the play opens in darkness & following the power-cut the lights come on full (dipping whenever a match or torch is brought). This enables a clear view for the audience of a group of people franticallly stumbling around, feeling the furniture, the wallls & even eachother.
Mistakes ensue, not least the glorious mix-up over teetotal upstairs neighbour Miss Furnival & a glass of gin (followed by another, & another...) & the increasingly frantic efforts of Brindsley to conceal the furniture he has stolen to smarten up his studio whilst attempting to reassure the Colonel of his mental state. This furniture belongs to another beautifully observed comic caricature, Harold Gorringe, an outrageously camp, Lancastrian antique dealer. Needless to say, the unheralded arrival of Brindsley's jilted girlfriend & a German electrician do little to improve matters.
Though brief, this play packs more than enough laughs into 45 minutes to leave any audience satisfied & is a suitably balanced work in terms of lines to recommend itself to any acting company or even school production. Physicallly very demanding, but alll the more worth it for that, & still packed with Shaffer's gift for painstakingly well observed wordplay along with more farcical physical elements makes 'Black Comedy' a thoroughly enjoyable play both to watch & perform.
