This is the second play this month which is about a group of actors putting on a performance, in this case of The Beggar's Opera, which I read and reviewed waaay back on day 12 of this blog. There's a lot of comedy (and some fairly kinky romance themes) in the backstage antics, along with a big dose of emotional blackmail. The songs and lines they are rehearsing reflect and intertwine with the more serious parts of the story, which works out nicely for pretty much the whole thing, until the ending. The Beggar's Opera has a twist happy ending with a reprieve from hanging, but it's left entirely unclear whether the mirror character in A Chorus will get similarly "let off". By this point he's managed to damage relationships with almost everyone in the company, though it's perhaps an interesting staging question whether he's really been as innocent in the whole situation as he makes out (and reads on the surface).
Using the play to reflect the rest of the action is certainly a much-used device in terms of play-within-a-play type stories, but in this case I think it feels closer to some experiences I've had personally - when working for months on a script it can be easy to start seeing parallels in life to those situations your character finds on stage, or even start to deal with those situations informed by how your character copes in the script. That mentality, where the problem feels just a little bit familiar because you've acted through it, makes it very easy for things to go wrong when there's no script, and your own needs are far more complex than the characters involved on stage. I hope I'm making some sort of sense here, it's not an easy concept to write conscicely.
I enjoyed reading this script and I'd certainly like to track down a performance at some point, not least to see whether Guy gets played as the overly-hazed new recruit or basically as a spy. The former is the more obvious choice but he certainly has the potential to have his own agenda hidden under the surface.
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