Crieff Drama Group delights its diners
Crieff Drama Group triumphed once again with their popular Supper Theatre.
This eagerly- anticipated annual event has become a firm fixture on many people’s calendars and their loyal audience knows to expect a great evening’s entertainment.
They certainly won’t have been disappointed – this may have been the best yet.
This time the programme consisted of four short plays, all quite different but linked by the themes of love, marriage, relationships and the assumptions we all make.
Opening the show was John Cummings, performing a delightful pastiche of Hamlet with ‘The Bachelor’s Soliloquy’ in which a groom about to take the plunge debates the relative merits and drawbacks of marriage.
John was both charming and convincing as he vacillated between the hope that marriage would be wonderful and the fear that it would be a terrible mistake.
As ‘ Yesterday’ by Colin Campbell Clements opens, two apparent strangers are engaged in a conversation whilst a party ensues offstage. Their exchange is filled with nostalgia as they both recall a party in the same house 40 years before when they were both young and in love.
Neil Combe’s slightly bumbling General Sir Richard Farrington has come to the party in the hope of finding a trace of the girl he had wanted to marry.
Elizabeth Rapczynska’s Countess AnnaMaria Pavlova quickly realises that he is her lost love but seeks answers for why he left before she reveals her identity.
Neil and Elizabeth’s touching performances left the audience with the hope that, finally reunited, these two lonely people would find happiness in love.
In contrast, the characters in ‘Countdown’ by Alan Ayckbourn have obviously been together a long time.
They have reached the stage where they assume they can read each other’s minds but, in truth, they have lost the art of communication and now live in a state of perpetual misunderstanding.
The audience was given an insight into this thanks to a soundtrack of the actors’ previously recorded voices.
This added to the technical challenge both for Mike Owens and Helen Day as the husband and wife and for the sound crew as timing was crucial.
It also meant that much of the acting depended on facial expressions and gesture. Mike and Helen provided a masterclass in subtlety whilst the dramatic irony of being party to the characters’ thoughts made the piece simultaneously amusing and rather melancholy.
Following the first three plays, Gourlays served an excellent two course supper and then glasses were replenished in anticipation of the final performance.
In ‘Alternative Accommodation’ by Pam Valentine, Anna – played with her usual aplomb by Ann Morrison– has been a widow for three months and her grown-up children have assembled to persuade her to sell the family home and move to the eponymous alternative accommodation.
As Anna has uncharacteristically been sleeping in, she leaves them alone whilst she gets dressed and her three middleaged offspring spend the first half of the play debating the options they think would result in the least possible disruption to their own lives.
Tom Inglis and Helen Day were believably business- like as Peter and Joy who seemed to see their mother as a problem to be solved and Kate Beauchamp was excellent as irritating vicar’s wife Gemma.
By the time their mother reappears, the audience’s sympathies lay firmly with Anna, and it was satisfying to discover that she had her own plans for the future, including a new man!
So much work goes into the Crieff Drama Group performances and unfortunately it is impossible to name check everyone involved but the cast and crew should give themselves a pat on the back for another job extremely well done.