While many Woody Allen fans might be familiar with his 1972 film Play it Again, Sam, fewer will be aware that this highly movie-centric film was originally a Broadway play. In this upcoming production, director Peter Lunga brings the story back to its onstage roots. Working with the original Broadway script, rather than the film’s screenplay, means that neurotic protagonist Allan’s lucklessness in love is not played out across the city of San Francisco as in the film. Instead, the cramped setting of the Corpus Playroom will serve as the early-70s New York apartment, in which the writer’s wry comic dialogue takes centre stage.

The play’s action revolves around Allan, the gauche and angsty movie geek, unlucky in love and looking for a real-life movie magic ending to match his daydreams. Played by Woody Allen in the film version, he is Allan by name, Allen by nature. Shifting between real life and imagined scenes in which Allan inhabits his favourite films, the play charts its protagonist’s clumsy attempts to become as sexy and sophisticated as his onscreen idol, Humphrey Bogart – whose imaginary ghost pops up from time to time to provide some much-needed dating advice.  

Lunga’s focus is on realising Allen’s comic vision by working through the text of the play – neither assistant director Olivia Morgan nor Matthew Fellows, playing Allan, have seen the film. While Fellows admits that “it’s hard to be a neurotic New York Jew without being Woody Allen”, he wants to avoid turning his role into a two-hour-long impersonation, and says that there is more to the character than meets the eye: “Allan changes from being a source of comedy to something quite sad…there are a few bittersweet moments in his scenes when everything suddenly becomes very grounded.” Morgan has also been creating poignancy in Allan’s love scenes through her directorial decisions, “adding a few more touching glances to make it more genuinely intimate.”

The seriousness underpinning the comedy seems to spring from Lunga’s passionately held view that funny does not have to mean superficial: “I don’t agree that tragedy is more serious than comedy. I think that comedy can be as, or even more serious and more profound than tragedy in drama.” For Lunga, the journey of Allan’s character has a moving significance, despite all the comic fecklessness: "There’s an important meaning in what happens to Allan: he goes from being a depressed, introverted, angsty, neurotic man to someone still introverted but somehow happier.” Fellows agrees: "There’s a nice line in the play about being one of life’s doers or one of life’s watchers, which comes in with watching the films. I think there’s a deeper meaning in that – Allan is obsessed with these films and enjoys watching them, but his own life is static.”

For all this talk of profundity, it is the comedy which Lunga hopes will delight audiences at the Corpus Playroom this week. “People deserve to see something which is profound and which really says something interesting, but is also light and happy and wonderful.” For those who are beginning to feel a little unhinged as term winds its way into Week 5, Play It Again, Sam promises to be an uplifting escape. In a university full of slight neurotics, watching the exploits of the obsessive Allan will perhaps give us a way of laughing at ourselves.  

Play it Again, Sam is at the Corpus Playroom from Tuesday 5th November to Saturday 9th November 

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