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Stars explained: * A production of no real merit
with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not
enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real
life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A
good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely
achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a
great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major
flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic
which lifts theatre to another plane. |
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Dinner party cooks up the laughs
Potted wisdom: Les Jukes and Angie Martin as Julie-Anne's balmpot parents Derek and Dee Jobson RolePlay Hall Green Little Theatre **** MEETING the respective parents for the
first time is always a bit traumatic for any couple. Will they like me
starts to give way to will I like them with age and for Justin and Julie
(or Julie-Anne if you please when her parents are around) there are
added worries. Will Justin's mother stay sober enough to make it
as far as the soup, for example. Throw in a retired lapdancer landing on the
balcony from the penthouse above while escaping from Rudi, her jealous
psychopathic boxing promoter boyfriend and the evening certainly starts
to become . . . well, different. Then when Rudi's gun toting minder bursts in to
take her back you can take it that the chances of an “Ahhhh Bisto” cosy
family dinner party have probably departed over the Docklands balcony
and sunk in the storm lashed Thames below. Julie-Ann, played gamely by Lucy Poulter in a
protective boot after a bad foot injury, is, to be honest, a bit wet and
has a sort of infant school teacher attitude to Justin. And you do have
to wonder about someone obsessing about a missing dessert fork and
wandering off into the night to borrow one . . . from who you might well
ask? Justin, played by Rob Smith, has that defeated
look of a man resigned to a life of domestic hen peckery, particularly
when he discovers the new celibacy-before-marriage rules suddenly
announced by Julie, who, if truth be known, is a bit of an odd woman. When you meet her parents, Derek and Dee, though
it is a wonder she is not odder. Les Jukes as Derek is superb giving us a dour,
bigoted, self-opinionated, Yorkshireman with a very slow and
deliberate way of speaking as if each word is inspected and checked to
ensure it is clean behind the ears before it is released into the world. Angie Martin as Dee is a perfect foil, with manic
laughter at Derek's painful attempts at jokes. Julie-Anne (the parents are here now) reckons he
is the funniest man she knows, and as she did not mean peculiar it all
adds to the growing worries about her. We also discover that Julie-Anne has two sisters
that her parents never talk about, one in Canada and one in Truro, which
obviously means that Derek will have to tell us why. Let's just say it all comes down to their .
. . relationships which are not the sort of thing Derek and Dee think
Yorkshire folk are used to and certainly should not get up to.
Linda Neale, as Arabella, Justin's mother, has the difficult job of playing a drunk. The secret is not to be a sober person pretending
to be drunk which usually descends quickly into panto but rather imagine
a drunk trying very (hic) hard to appear normal and sober which she
manages to perfection putting her unsteady and well lubricated foot in
it with gay abandon. And amid this game of happy families we have lap
dancer Paige, as in three, played with a mix of fear and defiance with
hint of seduction by Kalpana Boodhoo. Minding her is ex-boxer Micky,
played with a mildly punch drunk bewilderment and halfhearted menace by
Tony O'Hagan. The production, directed by Helen Dawson on a
nice, clean open set from Mel Hulme, is a little slow to get going as
Justin and Julie set the scene, telling us who is who and what is
supposed to be planned - not that you can inject an awful lot of life
into a couple laying a table, making soup and preparing for a
dinner party. But once Paige drops in, literally, and the other
characters start to appear the pace, and the sound level incidentally,
picks up considerably accelerating to farce speed.
As with any play by Sir Alan Ayckbourn there is clever use of words and some very funny throwaway lines which are easy to miss but this cast manage to find them all but add with some nice little touches of their own as they find the funny side at every opportunity. Derek even manages to make the mundane very funny
such as his laboured description of his three garden centres, all in
t'south Yorkshire, a tale so laced in boredom it should rival Mogadon
for its soporific qualities but instead it has the audience in stitches As the night wears on Justin starts to have doubts about the impending announcement of his engagement – and having met Derek and Dee who could blame him - Micky has his own doubts about wanting to work for Rudi any more while Paige just wants to escape the clutches of Rudi who is on his way back. Meanwhile Arabella just wants to get home to
Godalming, preferably via the pub and as a distraction after the desert,
which presumably was taken minus a fork, we have a punch-up between
Paige and Julie-Anne which sees our hostess having to take to her bed.
As the dust settles on what is now an empty flat it is left to Derek and
Dee to take on the simple task of explaining it all to our friendly
neighbourhood nutter Rudi. So as dinner parties and engagement announcements
go it perhaps does not class as a stunning success but for the audience
it was a most enjoyable evening from the soup right through to the
cheese and biscuits and liqueurs. Roger Clarke |
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