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Wrington Drama
Club
ARCHIVE Interior Designs & Six Sketches Review by Richard Thorn - 5 pages of photos |
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| Over four evenings at the end of May, 2005, the Drama Club gave us two small productions, Interior Designs by Jimmie Chinn, and Six Sketches by Michael Frayn. I shot a video on the Thursday evening, and I didn’t find myself in the company of a vast audience, which was a pity because, in contrast to the blockbuster, in-your-face productions like Fiddler on the Roof, what we were faced with depended totally on the quality of the writing, a convincing cast, and sensitive direction. From the outset it was clear the Prompt was redundant, and the four seasoned actors - Kate Morley, Liz Thomas, Ruth Taylor and Peter Jones - presented characterisations of a convincing depth. The minimal set, use of lighting, and direction by Mark Bullen foregrounded the perfomances unobtrusively. After the interval, Michael Frayn’s ability to take one simple idea, shake it about thoroughly like a dog with a bone, and produce some delicious variations on a theme, was again conveyed by skilful playing which managed to suggest the cast were very comfortable, thank you, with the roles they’d been allocated. Peter Inman, Steve Osman and Simon Medd were perfectly frightful (and that’s a compliment, of course) as trivia-obsessed brothers, and Rebecca Bryce piled on the years to suggest aeons of patient motherhood. If one didn’t know better, one would have sworn Fred Cowgill and Echo Irving had also had a lifetime’s experience of ruining each other’s reading enjoyment and fixation with the telly. There isn’t space here for my close-up of Echo’s slippers, but they’re worth a look at elsewhere on the website [see above]. The cast for the last item, being no more than Sarah Miller, in a sense took on the biggest challenge - holding throughout a conversation with a non-physical ‘other’, and demanding a range of emotional states. Sarah more than rose to the challenge. Like all the other ‘second-halfers’, she was directed by Echo Irving. Without being unappreciative of the larger, more resource-dependent productions, I have to admit taking a high degree of pleasure from the basic, essential skills of acting and interacting, characterisation and movement of the body, fine scriptwriting and holding moments of silence. RT |
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