The Frontmezzjunkies Interview: The Star and Director on the Precision Behind the Pandemonium in the Shaw Festival’s New Farce
By Ross
The summer has already been a remarkable one for Peter Fernandes. Only days after making an assured directorial debut at the Shaw Festival with Sleuth, he returns to the Festival stage in an entirely different challenge, stepping into not just one role, but many.
In One for the Pot, the legendary British farce by Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton, Fernandes plays numerous identical Hickory Wood siblings, each arriving as an inheritance of £10,000 is about to be doled out in a whirlwind of split-second costume changes, mistaken identities, and escalating comic chaos. Reuniting him with director Chris Abraham and much of the creative team behind the Shaw‘s hugely successful One Man, Two Guvnors, the production has already been sending audiences out of the theatre wide eyed and laughing.
After finally seeing One for the Pot, I now fully understand why audiences leaving the Festival Theatre are grinning from ear to ear. The effortless chaos unfolding onstage hides an astonishing amount of craft, preparation, and trust. Before opening night, I had the opportunity to speak with star Peter Fernandes and director Chris Abraham about bringing this classic Whitehall farce to life, the precision hidden beneath every laugh, and why comedy deserves to be treated with exactly the same seriousness as drama.
FMJ: Congratulations, Peter Fernandes, on your superb directorial debut with Sleuth. Having just spent weeks thinking like a director, did returning to the rehearsal hall as an actor change the way you approached One for the Pot?
Peter Fernandes: Thank you! Right when I started exploring directing, part of my hope was that the two disciplines would inform one another, and I think they really have.
Directing has made me think much more about the architecture of a play: What is this scene doing in the larger arc of the story? What is the conversation you want to have with your audience? The challenge is then translating that into something specific and playable for the actors. What does this character want in this moment? What are they doing to achieve that outcome? The clearer those actions are, the stronger the storytelling becomes.
Coming back into rehearsals for One for the Pot, I found myself refocusing my preparation around those same questions. Being on the outside leading up to beginning rehearsals reinforced some of the things that seem so basic, but necessary: What do I want right now, and what am I doing to get it? And how do the answers to those questions influence the emotional and physical language of these characters?
It’s also been a really lovely continuation of the mentorship I’ve had with Chris Abraham. He’s been really generous in helping me develop as a director, so getting to come back into the rehearsal hall with him as an actor felt like an extension of conversations we’ve been having ever since we first started collaborating.
FMJ: Chris Abraham, you’ve reunited much of the One Man, Two Guvnors team for One for the Pot. What made you feel this was the right group of artists to tackle another classic British farce?
Chris Abraham: Casting at the Festival is always a collaborative process, and the wonderful thing is that Tim Carroll and Kimberley Rampersad, who assemble these companies, are exceptional at what they do. They’ve put together an incredible ensemble.
I did have the great privilege of working with many of these artists on One Man, Two Guvnors, and we developed a way of working together that absolutely informed how we approached One for the Pot. It’s a company that trusts one another, has each other’s backs, and genuinely delights in each other’s strengths. That’s such an important ingredient in farce, because the comedy only works when everyone is completely committed to supporting the story and each other. It becomes a real act of ensemble playing.
FMJ: Peter, you’re playing a number of Hickory Wood brothers, each appearing in rapid succession. Where did you begin creating personalities that audiences could instantly distinguish?
Peter Fernandes: To be completely honest, I was really intimidated about the task at first because differentiating these brothers is so integral to the show. But Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton give you a lot to work with, so the script was a great place to start. There are clues throughout about who these brothers are, how they treat other people, how other characters react to them, and what each of them wants. Their objectives and the obstacles they’re facing are all so different, so that immediately starts to separate them.
Then, of course, there are the accents. I have to give a shout-out to Jeffrey Simlett, our voice and dialect coach at Shaw, who was instrumental in helping shape the Hickory Woods’ voices.
When you’re changing characters that quickly, you’re so close to the material that it’s hard to know what’s reading, so you also have to trust your director to make sure each brother was landing clearly for the audience, while still feeling like a real person.
FMJ: Peter is juggling multiple characters, countless quick changes, and an extraordinary amount of stage business. As a director, how do you rehearse something that technical without losing the spontaneity great farce depends on?
Chris Abraham: Peter is actually only playing three characters (at least that’s all I’ll cop to for now – no spoilers) —which is still more than enough!
Farce asks for a fascinating balance. On one hand, it requires an almost obsessive attention to detail: timing, motivation, given circumstances, rhythm, precision. You’re constantly refining tiny moments because every beat matters.
But at the same time, you have to leave room for abandon. Some discoveries happen in the rehearsal hall, some don’t arrive until previews when there’s an audience in the room. Like most worthwhile things, it’s about balancing discipline with freedom.
That’s one of the reasons I love directing this kind of play. It demands humility, patience, and an exacting attention to detail, but it also asks you to know when to put all of those precision tools down and simply trust the actors to play.
FMJ: Farce often looks effortless when it’s working, but I imagine it’s built on extraordinary precision. How much of this production feels like choreography, and how much room is there for spontaneity once the audience arrives?
Peter Fernandes: I’m going to start by giving credit to the script again because it’s an incredible blueprint. It was clear that they had done so much refining of the mathematical work already. The specific entrances and exits, the timing, even practical things like furniture and prop placement are all carefully built into the text. It was a fantastic skeleton to build from.
Then, in rehearsal, we spent a lot of time playing. You could look at the demands of the script and think that it was restrictively prescriptive, but in reality, the physical world of the production came from trying things, following impulses, making each other laugh, and discovering what served the story. Over time, all of that play just became sharper and more exact. Of course, there are moments that have to happen with incredible accuracy. The physical choreography has to be safe (shout out to our fight director Geoff Scovell), and the comic timing has to be reliable. But once that foundation is there, that’s actually what gives you the freedom to be spontaneous.
The audience really becomes another scene partner, especially with a farce. Throughout previews, and really right up until opening, we were still discovering little moments, tiny bits of mischief, and beats where you can feel the audience leaning in before you move on. That’s one of my favourite things about doing farces. The structure stays the same every night, but there’s always room to play within it.
FMJ: Billy Hickory Wood sits at the centre of all this chaos, while his identical brothers constantly threaten to derail everything. Was there one sibling who surprised you during rehearsals or gradually became your favourite to play?
Peter Fernandes: Before I answer that, I have to give a huge shout-out to one of my castmates, Martin Happer, who plays Charlie Barnett. While I’m the source of so much of the chaos in this show, I would say Charlie is at the centre of it, desperately trying to keep the whole thing from collapsing around him. Martin is one of the funniest actors I know, and so much of the joy of playing these brothers comes from getting to throw increasingly impossible problems at him. We previously worked together on The Importance of Being Earnest and One Man, Two Guvnors, so getting reunited for another comedy has been an absolute treat.
As for my favourite brother, I think the biggest surprise was [SPOILER ALERT] Michael Hickory Wood, from Ireland. By the time he arrives in Act Two, we’ve spent so much time getting to know Billy and Rupert, and getting really invested in their pursuits, that Michael presents a wonderful opportunity to suddenly blow everything up again.
He’s also the brother who feels like he gets to have the most direct relationship with the audience. He says and does some of the most outrageous things in the play, and over the course of rehearsals I found myself leaning more and more into his sheer audacity. Every time he walks through the door, he somehow raises the stakes even further, and that’s very fun to play.
FMJ: You previously worked with Chris Abraham on One Man, Two Guvnors. What makes the two of you such good collaborators when it comes to this particular style of comedy?
Peter Fernandes: I think the more you work with someone, the easier it becomes to communicate. Chris has always been a director whose work I’ve admired enormously, and One Man, Two Guvnors was actually our second collaboration after The Master Plan at Crow’s Theatre. With each project we’ve developed a better understanding of how the other works, and that’s only deepened since I started directing and Chris began mentoring me in that capacity. We now have a shared language and similar tastes when we’re talking about shaping a scene or building a moment.
More than anything, though, I think we both take comedy very seriously. We approach a farce with the same rigour and care that we’d bring to drama, because we have a tremendous respect for what comedy can do.
It’s easy to think of comedy as lightweight because people are laughing, but I actually think it asks an enormous amount of both the artists and the audience. Laughter is a vulnerable act. For a room full of strangers to laugh together at the same moment is a communal experience, and I don’t think we should ever lose sight of that. We work hard because we believe comedy deserves that level of care.
FMJ: Farce really does only work when audiences believe the people inside all that chaos. Chris, how did you keep this production grounded in character while embracing its wonderfully outrageous premise?
Chris Abraham: The audience has to understand what every character is after, what they know, what they don’t know, and why every action makes perfect sense to them. If that logic is absolutely clear, that’s the best place to build from.
The play itself is also an extraordinary guide. You can feel that it emerged from actors discovering it together in the rehearsal room, and it’s incredibly generous in the clues it gives you. Our job was to pay close attention to what the play was asking of us, while staying open to the discoveries that happened in rehearsal. Once that foundation of clarity and logic is in place, you start to hear the wit in the language, you begin to play with different forms of jeopardy, the eccentricities of the characters emerge, and the little moments of clowning reveal themselves. But all of that has to be built on the fundamentals: clear given circumstances, strong objectives, genuine obstacles, and actors who are really listening and responding to one another.
FMJ: Audiences often think of farce as simply an evening of laughs, yet the best examples require incredible trust between actors, designers, stage management, and backstage crews. After living inside this production, what do you hope audiences appreciate about the craft behind making something this complicated look so effortless?
Peter Fernandes: Every laugh in this show is a collaboration. Of course the actors are visible, but every laugh depends on the entire company: stage management, the crew, wardrobe, props, the designers, the technical team. Everyone is playing the same game, and if one element is even slightly out of sync, the whole machine feels different.
One of the things Chris said very early in rehearsals has stayed with me throughout the process: He reminded us that, despite all the wild antics, doors slamming, mistaken identities, slapstick, and complicated situations, we could never lose sight of the people at the centre of it all. We have to care for each and every one of them.
These characters love deeply. They get hurt. They desperately pursue what they want, even if what they want is completely at odds with everyone else around them. We have to believe that they’re telling the truth, even when the circumstances seem absurd.
The audience shouldn’t only be laughing at a series of jokes, they should be invested in the people. And when they care about the characters, every misunderstanding matters more, every complication raises the stakes, and every laugh lands that much harder.
