Writer: Eoin Carney
I didn’t realize 45 minutes had already passed by the end of The Man Who Said Too Much, an off-beat comedy with plenty of personality, featuring four energetic actors in a noir décor complete with an old-fashioned telephone and unmistakable fedora hats. The premise? A private detective with an untreatable “can’t-stop-talking” pathology wanders into the not-so-dangerous underworld of city life, only to overstep a few amorous boundaries and get himself shot. The setup is actually rather fortuitous, as the recovery process involves his meeting an unexpected match in the person of a like-minded, similarly diseased vamp-slash-hospital nurse who, like our wonderfully afflicted protagonist, has a real hard time learning to keep her thoughts to herself. The question is, as the producers put it, whether two people can actually be together if they always say exactly what they think.
Paul Bianchi’s private dick may have a motor mouth on him, but that is entirely in character for a wannabe unscrupulous Marlowe/Spade type with a considerably softer spot than he can afford in the noir world. Written by Eoin Carney with an eye for detail, the text is pleasantly funny, particularly when it runs off course – which it does almost all the time. Getting into the nooks and crannies of the modern male hero’s semi-perverted yet wonderfully humorous, love-afflicted mind, Carney digs just a little deeper than noir icons such as Dashiell Hammett or James M. Cain would have by putting into his characters’ mouths the thoughts they would normally keep to themselves. In this context, the horse-racing scene between Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep would certainly lose some of its wonderfully innocuous innuendo, but gain a literalness and sexual humour probably not seen in the noir universe since the Steve Martin parodies of the 1980s, which, let’s face it, weren’t that funny to start with.
What seems to be lacking is a stronger sense of pacing and atmosphere, something a more assured directorial hand and more insistent lighting design could have easily brought out of the material. This is not to say that the show doesn’t work as it is: the text is strong enough to carry it, the actors clearly enjoy the ride, and the result is an entertaining, genuinely funny 45 minutes that leaves you wishing the production had pushed its own noirish possibilities just a little further.
Runs until August 15 2026 | Image: Contributed
