Black Comedy / White Lies is a play, composed of two unrelated acts, by Peter Schaffer
Black Comedy is the stuff of which British risque comedies are made. It focuses on Brindsley Miller, an opportunistic young sculptor who is facing one of the most important evenings of his life, the night in which he is to meet both the tyrannical father of his debutante fiancee and a millionaire patron of the arts capable of making his career. Just before his guests arrive, a fuse blows, plunging his South Kensington apartment into darkness. What follows is a series of mishaps and embarrassments as people fall down stairs, constantly bump into doors and furniture, and mistakenly grope each other. The play's humour hinges on a highly theatrical concept: when the lights are on in Brindsley's flat at the beginning of the piece, the actors are in total darkness; when the lights go out, the stage is then lit, allowing the audience to watch the cast stumble about and fumble as they try to complete the simplest of tasks.
White Lies revolves around Sophie Lemberg, an eccentric and disillusioned fortune teller (who imagines herself to be a Baroness of the Holy Roman Empire) living in a decaying seaside resort, and the two young men - Tom, the lead singer in a rock band, and Frank, his business manager - who consult her. It soon becomes clear that their lives are much stranger than the fiction Sophie tries to create in her magic ball.
