Tall tales Lovage or leave it? BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Even dour British playwrights like to have fun. Peter Shaffer, who penned Equus and Amadeus for our serious consideration, in 1990 gave us a light extended conversation on the utility of frivolity called Lettice & Lovage. Firehouse Theater, in Newport, is giving a droll rendition through June 14.

Hell for Shaffer would be rebirth as a mime. You’d think Winston Churchill had written his two famous plays, they’re so dependent on speeches and chin-stroking pronouncements. That’s so here as well, but now we have a talking head as funny, in her own stiffly proper way, as Winny when he’d gone one snifter too far.

Miss Lettice Doufet (Barbara Finelli) is the closest British literature will ever get to a Zorba the Greek. The life-grabbing temperament of Lettice (her name is pronounced like the vegetable) is expressed through her adamant conviction that when life is mumbling at you at volume two or three, it’s our responsibility to turn the dial up to 10. Most of the first scene is a monologue — actually, a series of four increasingly outrageous monologues. Lettice, you see, is giving historical lectures at the Fustian House (don’t rush off to the dictionary: fustian means pompous or pretentious). The official tale she has to tell is pretty anticlimactic, the high point being that Queen Elizabeth almost fell down the staircase in 1585, but John Fustian grabbed her arm and was promptly knighted for his troubles. In her first version, the rather dull information is delivered brightly — clearly this is her first day on the job. Next, she is as bored to tears as her milling tourist listeners, until she embellishes the account, and the hem of the queen’s gown, with six huge pearls.

By the fourth talk we overhear, she has burdened the feast table with roasted hedgehogs and puffins she imagines were there and has Fustian leap the staircase in a single bound. The small plate into which she directs listeners to leave tips has become a soup bowl, customarily brimming from appreciative, if misguided, house tour visitors.

Unfortunately, one of the visitors is Miss Charlotte Schoen (Cindy Killavey), who works in the personnel department of the Preservation Trust, which employs Lettice. In the next scene, she has been called on the carpet before Charlotte, about to lose her job. We learn that her penchant for the larger-than-life was learned at the knee of her Falstafian mother, who led an all-women acting troupe, Les Barbares, who performed Shakespeare through the French countryside. (In this production, her Gallic history is not another fib — she has the wall posters to prove it in Act Two.)

Shaffer had the makings of a solid one-act play here. And if he had successfully shifted focus and given over the second half to Charlotte, all might be well. What we have been set up for, of course, is for the prim and self-righteous Miss Schoen to be won over by the life-affirming ebullience of the free-spirited Lettice. But Charlotte, as written, never comes into her own — and this production doesn’t risk her delving into the bitterness at life ("This world gets uglier by the minute," she blurts) that could provide greater contrast and payoff for us later.

The playwright has Charlotte, out of guilt over firing Lettice, concoct a letter of recommendation, so that her erstwhile nemesis can wax fantastic as a London riverboat guide. He tacks on a concluding scene that has Charlotte’s transformation described rather than shown, if you can believe it, and contrives that an accident be misconstrued by the police as attempted murder. As Lettice, Finelli maintains a convincing balance as proper representative of that sceptered isle as well as carpe diem hobbyist. She does a good job physicalizing the fun — which this rather static production could use more of — as Lettice acts out a lecture fantasy of a swarm of misshapen servants crawling up the staircase. Killavey is best in that concluding act, when her Miss Schoen has lost her starchy reserve and is given a glimpse of the person who had been cowering inside Charlotte, gathering the courage to march out.

Enterprise is in evidence in the low-budget set design. A couple of baroque chairs were obtained from the Newport Art Museum and Belcourt Castle. That 15-step staircase was dutifully constructed for us, and a small tapestry is hung to convey historical manor ambience. And in this production, playwright Shaffer not withstanding — although Lettice might claim otherwise — no horses were blinded for our edification or entertainment.