Forty years ago, renowned playwright Neil Simon launched the characters of Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison, the protagonists of his ground-breaking theatrical comedy The Odd Couple, onto an unsuspecting American public.

Felix and Oscar, the perennial, fastidious obsessive-compulsive and the eternal slob respectively, immediately caught Joe Public’s imagination worldwide, what with an immensely successful Broadway run being followed shortly by a hit movie (with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau), and a subsequent, equally successful TV series (featuring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, both Neil Simon mainstays).

The situation that renders The Odd Couple so successful is beautiful in its simplicity.

A recently separated man moves in with his divorced buddy in an attempt to form a kind of mutual-aid partnership.

The only problem is: Felix and Oscar are poles apart in everything, bar none. The cracks begin to show almost immediately and before a couple of weeks are over, you begin to wonder how long it will be before one of the two leaves the apartment in a body-bag!

Simon’s mark of genius is the way he portrays a potentially tragic predicament with such humanity and with such comic panache simultaneously.

The characteristic of Simon’s comedy that sets it apart, however, is the fact that The Odd Couple is still as fresh and relevant as it was 40 years ago. This is possibly due to the fact that the nature of the male of the species has not changed much in four decades, and the innate anxieties, idiosyncrasies, obsessive tendencies and firmly-held beliefs that characterise most men when they’re vulnerable and raw, still hold sway today.

And when TWO of these fine specimens of male are pitted together in the same space… the results are predictably explosive.

The Odd Couple will be performed at The Manoel Theatre over two weekends – on Saturday and Sunday 23 and 24 April and the following weekend from 29 April to 1 May.

Booking is now open from the Manoel Theatre by phoning 2124-6389, email: [email protected], online booking: www.teatrumanoel.com For more information, please contact Masquerade on 2124-6619 or 7979-3737, website: www.masquerademalta.com.

Masquerade is supported by Bank of Valletta, Travelex Financial Services, Air Malta, the Malta Tourism Authority and Portomaso.