O Teatro

I just watched The Play House which was the first film that was presented in the "Industrial Strength Keaton" DVD collection of various Buster Keaton films from the silents to the end of his life. The first half where he appears in various incarnations of himself was quite impressive especially when 9 of him appear together in the same frame. Some amusing, if not hilarious, gags occur there. The rest of the short has Buster being an actual stagehand/performer who goes through more hilarious mishaps that has to be seen to be believed. I especially loved the way he put out a man's fiery beard or got a woman out of a water tank. Not to mention how he impersonates a monkey. Or how he tells one twin sister from another. So on that note, I highly recommend The Play House.

... and there is stiff competition.

This two reeler is set in a vaudeville house, the kind of place Keaton grew up in and where he grew into a comic as part of The Three Keatons, along with his parents, so he is familiar with this environment.

Keaton mainly plays a stagehand. Many descriptions say he is a goof up employee, but I'd say he is pretty innovative considering the strange messes into which he is thrown by the plot. He does some things here that you don't see much of in his other shorts - he pantomimes other types of people than he is or has had much contact with entirely. In the audience he plays an upper crust couple commenting on the low brow humor, he plays a grandma and her grandson, and he play s a middle class couple. He is also "the whole show" towards the beginning as there are all Busters in the orchestra, in a minstrel show, and he manages to dance with himself onstage, showing his knowledge of the camera and what it can do.

He also falls in love with one of two identical twins, played by Virginia Fox. Since he can't tell them apart without drawing an X on the one he wants, you have to wonder how he knows he really wants that one in the first place. Virginia Fox was the future wife of Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox for decades.

If you are not familiar with Buster Keaton's work, this is a great place to start. But then when it comes to Buster I can't think of a bad place to start save for his sound films at MGM, and even they have their charms.

In his prime, there was nobody quite like Buster Keaton, deservedly considered one of the greats in silent comedy. Nobody back then and even now were as daring when it came to high-risk stunt work in physical comedy and he was an unparallelled master at making deadpan both funny and expressive. Something that one doesn't see an awful lot as many would struggle at doing one of those let alone both well.

'The Play House' may not quite be among his very best overall, in a filmography full of quintessentials. When it comes to Keaton's short films though, and there is a vast amount of them, it's one of my favourites. 'The Play House' is a must see for any fan and for anybody and everybody and it is one of the most imaginative and funniest examples of the type of story it has, deliberately and undoubtedly silly certainly but endearingly so.

Of his silent short films, 'The Play House' is one of the best looking. The closest his short films get perhaps to being a technical achievement with a surprising amount of boundary pushing in film trickery when playing the amount of characters Keaton plays simultaneously.

A lot of funny and even hilarious moments, beautifully timed, deliciously wacky and it never feels too much. All of them work, when you watch 'The Play House' having just watched a good comedy albeit with a couple of misses in the humour department or a comedy that is not funny at all and not good in quality too that is great. There is enough variety to not make it all repetitive. Some of the more physical work is typically daring

While a very slight one, the story is charming and never dull, even with the freedom it has. The vaudeville dream sequence is the very meaning of a show-stopper. Virginia Fox is appealing and the rest of the cast have fun with their roles.

Keaton is the reason to see 'The Play House' though. In a huge number of roles executed simultaneously and handled expertly. Such great comic timing and he is worth rooting for as well, his unique quality of his deadpan delivery never faltering.

Summarising, wonderful. 10/10

Drawing from his experience in vaudeville during his youth, The Playhouse is one of Keaton's most autobiographical shorts. Keaton displays his inventive genius for visual effects in a dream sequence by playing the role of all performers in a minstrel show and its audience as well. Each Buster, from drum player to a Grandma Buster, has its own distinctive personality and character. This is truly one of the great sequences of Keaton's career.

Buster is awakened from his dream of grandiose, caught sleeping on the job. In the second part of the short, he plays a stagehand who gets into trouble both on and off the stage. From this point forward the short relies less on technical marvel, but remains equally entertaining. Keaton's facial impressions when dressed up as a monkey are priceless.

As with most Keaton shorts, there are many unique details which enhance the overall film, but are not essential to the plot. Some of the funniest shots in the film don't even involve Buster, specifically two hilarious Civil War veterans in the theater's audience, each with only one arm.

Buster's co-star in The Playhouse is Virginia Fox. She does a charming job in a dual role playing twins. It has been written that in his youth Buster had a fondness for twin performers and was known to pursue both sisters.

This has to be one of the strangest, most daring films ever made by a major Hollywood studio, and surely the funniest and most perceptive study of madness in all cinema. The first ten minutes are a breathtaking display of bewildering surrealist magic. Buster Keaton buys a ticket for a variety show. Buster Keaton conducts an orchestra of Buster Keatons, defeated by their hostile instruments. An art-deco line of Buster Keaton minstrels have a calm discussion, while pairs of male and female Buster Keatons make up the audience, restless, spiteful and belligerant.

This is stunning cinema in any language (arf), and a supreme visualisation of mental breakdown, distorted personality, megalomania, and the most terrifying anxieties. It is also an hilarious pre-empting of the auteur theory - the elaborate playbill reveals Buster Keaton to be responsible for EVERYTHING, from scenario to lighting - this monopoly of creativity leads to chaos, madness, fragmentation and estrangement.

As in so many of Keaton's films, this remarkable fantasy is shown to be the dream of a lowly, bullied man, this time a theatrical hand. Far from diminishing the film's dreamlike structure, this revelation intensifies it. An astonishing series of variations on the line between art and life, dream and reality ensues, an argument which descends into ever-increasing spirals of confusion and disintegration.

Some of Keaton's best comic set-pieces follow, all hilarious in themselves, yet underlining the melancholy and fears of Buster himself - be he ordinary man or isolated genius. Life can never remain stable for him, his personality is shot to pieces - whether through existential crises or booze is unclear; like Gulliver in Houyhnhm land, his humanity is stripped to the level of bestiality - a very funny, subversive sequence, which is as despairing as the end of NIGHTMARE ALLEY.

The supposedly redemptive love interest is a bewildering, tormenting game on Buster, as he repeatedly fails to remember which twin is his fiancee. The continually collapsing sets are a thematically rich, Usher(playhouse, geddit?)-like representation of Buster's fragile mind. To universalise the genius of Buster Keaton is to belittle and emasculate him. He is like us only because his trauma is so particular.