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Theft
- touring
Playwright
- Eric Chappell
Director - Jeremy Meadow
Designer - Jeremy Gladwin
Producers - TEG Productions
Venue - Kings Theatre then continues
touring
Dates - 15 - 19 May
Times - Tues to Fri at 7:30pm Wed and Sat at 2:30pm
Performance lasts 2hr 30mins including interval.
Reviewer -Thelma Good
The setting is
sucessful businessman John Miles and his wife Barbara's converted barn's
living room in the remote English countryside. It's a mess, there's
a leather suite and what look like books by the yard in green, red and
yellow, one ornament, a cherub, and picture lights but no pictures.
Everything of taste or quality has gone including John's Meissen. They've
been out with John's friends from school, Trevor and Jenny Farrington.
Yep it's what we all dread - a burglary, but who has been stealing what
from whom?.
As the plot continues Roy Hudd, with all his considerable comic
skill, appears as a character who brings truth into these four lives.
Hudd's character has much of the same amusing physicality that
Jacque Tati and Peter Sellars had. There are some very funny lines and
exchanges - who is actually thieving from whom, is sometimes revealed,
sometimes obscured along with red herrings and further deception.
Joanna Van Gyseghem as Barbara turns out not to be quite the bimbo
in a well played scene with Trevor Peter Alexander in the second
half where misunderstandings and mishearings mount. Jenny, Sandra
Payne, is a woman disappointed in life but still a coper and in
a role we are used to seeing him in, Grantham's John has the
disquieting charm of a man continually on the make.
With some telling swipes about the world of high business and share
options, Chappell has written a play which sometimes successfully makes
sharp comment about the distorted way our modern Britain "works".
The slow first scene gains momentum and pace when Hudd appears
and it is his character who is the most interesting to watch as he finds
his way into all the others' hidden values. At the start of the tour
and the run, the play needs tightening and the cast need to find more
of its rhythms. There are echoes of An Inspector Calls and The
Real Inspector Hound but at the moment they are rather faint.
© Thelma Good May 15 2001
