A boring tour around a boring house reaches the
boring staircase . . . yawn Pictures: Alastair Barmsley
Lettice and Lovage
Highbury Players
(Because of the difficult circumstances
involved in staging this production stars have been omitted)
IF your childhood was spent touring rural
France with your actor/manager, very English, single parent mother,
while she was performing Shakespeare, in French, with her all female
company, Les Barbares, then
perhaps eccentricity might just be a possibility.
Or in the case of Lettice Douffet a certainty.
Let’s be honest, mad and hatters spring to mind. We first encounter her
as a guide at Fustian House, a 16th century pile where the only
historical event of interest was a visit by Elizabeth I who stumbled
when her foot caught in her gown at the top of the stairs. She could
have fallen to her death, changing the course of history.
But she didn’t; end of story and end of history.
The tourists were bored, Lettice was bored, everyone was bored and for
good reason. The house was dull, the staircase ordinary and nothing of
note had ever happened there in 400 years.
So to brighten up the tour Lettice embellished
that one, single dull, vaguely interesting fact, and like Topsy, the
embellishment grew with each new tour until Fustian House had a history
to rival that of any stately pile in the nation.
Until, that is, Lotte Schoen, from Human
Resources at the house’s preservation trust joins a tour after
complaints about the voracity of information being imparted by the
guide.
Appalled she summons Lettice to a meeting where
she is sacked, but not before we discover our intrepid guide's
philosophy of life based on her mother’s code, "Enlarge! Enliven!
Enlighten!" or indeed her view that “fantasy floods in where fact leaves
a vacuum”. Without adding
 colour all you have is what Lettice calls the
‘merely’.
Thus we have the two
different sparring characters that are the hallmark of many of Peter
Shaffer’s plays (Equus, Amadeus, Sleuth
. . .); the eccentric and delightfully dotty Lettice and the more
fact-bound, realistic and straight-laced Lotte with, seemingly, their
only common ground an interest in history.
Sandra Haynes as Lotte (left)
and Yvonne Lee as Lettice
The dull and the dotty, except we are to discover
hidden, exciting secrets in Lotte’s past and, when weeks later they
become friends, we find she has discarded her stuffy convention in their
growing relationship, which is all going swimmingly, until, of course
the police and solicitors become involved – attempted murder being such
a terrible bore.
The play is a delightful comedy full of clever
lines and witty remarks with Sandra Haynes doing a sterling job as the
straight-laced Lotte who finds escape into a world of historical fantasy
with Lettice. You feel for her embarrassment when her secret life is set
to be revealed to her conventional colleagues, destroying her
credibility in their normal world, and raise a glass with her at the end
as a new career opens up before her.
And Yvonne Lee does a quite remarkable job as
Lettice. Highbury stalwart Denise Phillips who was to play the role, was
taken ill a week ago and Yvonne, a former member who recently returned
to Sutton after 15 years, was to be the sit back, just follow the
script, no worries, prompt.
So, in the spirit of the show must go on, coupled
with persuasion by director Barbara Garrett, Yvonne stepped into
the breach, which was no mean undertaking.
With less than a week to learn and rehearse the
part it necessitated appearing, first night, script in hand in that
twilight zone for actors of knowing the part well, but not quite well
enough to tread the boards unaided, although so well did she carry
Lettice that the script was soon hardly noticed. Even a loss of
place on a couple of occasions was well covered by a natural Lettice
vagueness, leaving the audience oblivious that anything had been amiss.
ADVENTURE PACKED
She gives us a Lettice who is suitably wary, even
dismissive of ‘merely’ the real world, much happier in the adventure
packed worlds she creates, or in relating and reliving the derring dos
of the heroes, heroines and tragic figures of history.
It is a wonderful role to play . . . and a
difficult one to learn. She is off the stage for no more than a few
minutes, talking all the time she is on, with some long speeches and a
scattering of words that suggest a more than passing acquaintance with
Roget’s Thesaurus, and to top all it she speaks in a style which may be
easy on the ear but is a lot more difficult to implant in memory.
From opening night’s remarkable performance
Yvonne is not far from discarding the script and embracing Lettice
completely.
Trying hard to cope with Lettice is Mr Bardolph,
a legal aid solicitor selected because of his name, a character in
Falstaff’s merry band. His job is to defend Lettice who is accused of a
crime against Lotte she didn’t actually commit, didn’t actually happen,
at least as a crime, and one which Lotte did not actually report and
Lettice doesn't want to talk about.
All a bit frustrating and Rob Alexander meanders
his way around the difficulties with admirable legal elegance.
Then there is good support from Kerry Grehan as
Miss Framer, Lotte’s assistant at the trust, who is a sweet, attractive
girl but hardly one of nature’s gifted intellectuals – think short
planks – while Malcolm Robertshaw is the rather obnoxious Elizabethan
scholar who pops up among the assorted collection of visitors. He upsets
the apple cart by demanding to know the provenance of Lettice’s ever
more outlandish claims.
Robertshaw, incidentally, was responsible for the
excellent set design with the three scenes on a revolve meaning scene
changes, Fustian House to Lotte’s office to Lettice’s flat, are not only
highly effective sets but are changed and ready in seconds.
A new member of cast at such a late stage must
affect the entire company and play havoc with rehearsal schedules but
not so you would notice. Garrett has instilled a good pace and the
result is an enjoyable and clever comedy, despite its obvious
difficulties which, from opening night, appear very close to being
resolved. To 17-12-16
Roger Clarke
06-12-16
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