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Keeping pleasantly on track
The Ghost Train
Wolverhampton Grand
****
I always liked Arnold Ridley as Godfrey
in Dad’s Army. He had a charm that even I as a young teenager was always
drawn to as the gentle grandfatherly type that you might make model
airplanes with during a long English summer.
It’s a mild revelation then to find The Ghost
Train, written by him in 1923, has a more macabre and saucy overtone,
brought out to full effect in this production by Talking Scarlet,
directed by Patrick Kearns.
Ridley, after his many attempts at being a
playwright, was relieved that the play became his breakthrough piece
signalling the start of his long career. The premise for the story also
grew from local Midland roots as he was a member of the Birmingham Rep,
back in the 1920s. It was a long steam train journey from Brum to
Bristol that became the foundation of this his most successful play
which also went on to become a film.
Excuse the pun but there are more Midland
`connections ‘ now in this current production in the
presence of Jeffrey Holland, who plays the Station Master ,who not
only is a Walsall Born chap, but who also appeared several times in
Dad’s Army.
So to the plot. A collection of ` well to do’
upper class types are forced to spend a long night in a draughty
cold waiting room, much to their disgust , and are treated to the
ghostly tale of a runaway train that crashed some years before . The
train is now a ghostly midnight arrival that is heard racing through the
station at the same time each year, ever since the disaster happened.
Mr Holland as the Cornish Stationmaster played
the part very much as a stand-up caricature rather than the dastardly
evil cad he turns out to be. His real life wife Judy Buxton revelled in
the role of the spinsterish Miss Bourne and she definitely got to ` lie
down’ on the job as she spends half the play in a drunken stupour. I
should perhaps make it clear that that fact is a feature of her
character not a performance observation.
Capturing many of the laughs is Tom Butcher as
Teddie Deakin who skips about in his plus fours to the annoyance of his
stranded cohorts until the truth of his real identity is revealed. Ben
Roddy as Richard Winthrop and Corrine Wicks as Elsie did a nice job to
inject some genuine character into the proceedings, as the story of
their failing marriage unfolds only then to be rescued by the night’s
ghostly proceedings.
Finally the newlyweds of Peggy and Charles
Murdock played by Sophie Powles and Chris Sheridan added to the other
end of the marriage spectrum and were blessed with most of the `it’s
devilishly awful and ` it’s a rightly a queer business ‘type of lines.
Overall The Ghost Train is a pleasant evening’s
entertainment and that’s down mostly to the commitment and timing of the
actors who make a success of this typically ` British Boys Own’ piece of
theatre. It will definitely make you laugh and has a few well staged
jumpy moments. One thing that did stand out though, in the light of
complaints of the false Cornish accents currently heard in the new TV
series of Poldark, is the total lack of any true Cornish dialect here.
Other than that though, it` B’aint arf bad. To
11-04-15.
Jeff Grant
07-04-15
Ghostly goings on
****
THERE are so many laughs in
Arnold Ridley’s clever play you tend to forget this is a ghost story,
but the edge-of-the-seat moments are just waiting to happen – in the
waiting room of a lonely country station!
The man who became the
much-loved character Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army, but was a real-life
war hero, was inspired to write the tale after his own experience of
being stranded overnight in a remote railway station.
Here a very mixed group of
passengers reluctantly face spending the night in the bleak Fal Vale
station in Cornwall because there is no train to the next stop, Truro,
for nine hours.
Walsall-born actor Jeffrey
Holland plays the old Stationmaster Saul Hodgkin who strikes fear into
the travellers with a warning that the place is haunted, and anyone who
sees the ghost train will die.
The humour is provided by Tom
Butcher as the bizarre Teddie Deakin, and Holland’s wife Judy Buxton,
playing Miss Bourne, an elderly spinster with a parrot in a cage. She
doesn’t drink, but swallows a hip flask full of brandy to calm her
nerves and sleeps through the second act.
On opening night the eerie
mist got out of control and came down the waiting room chimney, but the
sound and lighting effects worked well despite competing with constant
bouts of coughing – not the nervous kind - in a section of the audience.
There is an impressive
performance from Jo Castleton as the troubled Julia Price in an
entertaining play, which has a clever twist, and is well directed by
Patric Kearns.
The Ghost Train runs to
11.04.15
Paul Marston
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