CANBERRA Rep’s latest extravaganza, the murderous black farce, “Arsenic and Old Lace”, is bound to get up quite a few noses.

Director Ian Hart has transferred the famous play/film from Brooklyn, New York, to Queanbeyan, “the Brooklyn of the ACT”.

The play burst on to Broadway and the West End in 1941 and has been in production somewhere in the world ever since. It was adapted for the screen directed by Frank Capra in 1944, starring Cary Grant and Boris Karloff.

It’s always been an extravagant piece, full of playwright Joseph Kesselring’s take on different kinds of psychopathy, exemplified in the Brewster family, all of whom delight in taking lives. 

That’s except for Mortimer (the Cary Grant role), a theatre critic who hates theatre but who is also getting increasingly worried about the genetic dispositions of his relatives. 

At least his fiancé Elaine is sane and even woke to the #MeToo movement. And anachronisms are no problem in this version, including the use of mobile phones.

It’s all pretty zany for Hart, who once staged the Spike Milligan-themed show, “Ying Tong – A Walk with the Goons” at The Street Theatre with two of his 2022 cast in the line-up. 

Mortimer’s two, sweet, old aunties Abby (Alice Ferguson) and Martha (Nikki-Lynne Hunter) live in an old house in Queanbeyan on which bits and pieces have been built, a joy for Rep designer Andrew Kay.

Up the road in the old cemetery is a mulberry tree from which they brew a delightful mulberry wine that, laced with a dash of arsenic, strychnine and cyanide, will produce the desired effects on their guests. Hart is publishing the recipe in the program. 

There are bodies galore.

According to Hart, a retired film director and producer who is busy writing his second novel, the show is packed with Queanbeyan and Canberra jokes, including several tasteless ones about theatre critics.

Among the kaleidoscope of psychopathic characters is Bobby, played by Robbie Matthews. In the original he’s Teddy, who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, but here thinks he’s Sir Robert Menzies and obligingly digs holes to bury “snake-bite victims” when the aunts require it. 

Then there’s the female cosmetic surgeon, Dr Swann, who replaces Dr Einstein, Peter Lorre’s hit part in the movie, and the demented Jonathan Brewster (Rob de Fries) who, instead of looking like Boris Karloff, a running joke in the movie, now looks like Freddy Krueger.

Hart has had fun changing some of the male characters into females – why shouldn’t there be a female constable O’Hara? Now she’s an ex-vice squad police officer, but who is at heart a sensitive would-be playwright.

The old ladies, Hart says consolingly, are almost the same as in Kesselring’s rather lengthy play, which he’s trimmed back dramatically. Originally descended from the Mayflower pilgrims, now they become CWA ladies, experts in making pumpkin scones and of course, their famous mulberry wine. 

Anna Senior is working on the costumes and while there may be a twinset and pearls for one of the aunts, there’s a hippie look for the other.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the film or the play, here’s a spoiler alert: very late in the plot, to his incredible joy, Mortimer Brewster discovers that he’s not related to anyone else in the family but has been adopted. Elated, he reveals to his tolerant fiancé Elaine: “I’m a bastard!” Quick as a flash – and this is pure Joseph Kesselring – she responds, “I knew that”.

“Arsenic and Old Lace,” Canberra Rep Theatre, June 9 (preview) to June 25. Book at canberrarep.org.au or 6257 1950.