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Show: Yorkshire Voices
Society: Grassington Players
Venue: Octagon Theatre
Credits: Keith Bromley
Type: Sardines
Performance Date: 26/03/2022
Yorkshire Voices
Keith Bromley
Review submitted by Marion Field
What a delightful evening we had at Grassington Players Yorkshire Voices. We were regaled with some first-class entertainment written by the late Keith Bromley, a well-liked local Grassington resident. The pieces were not dissimilar in style to Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues. We laughed and we cried.
In The Basque. Andrew Armstrong played an avid Welsh chapel attender, who saw it as his duty to conceal, by hastily buying from the jumble stall a lady’s not really respectable under garment, all made of soft, silky red material, trimmed with black lace and furnished with four suspenders… Oh, how he relished the repeated detailed descriptions of the basque that he just felt obliged to purchase so that young men in his Welsh village would not be corrupted by the sight of it… What convoluted explanations he had to give to the Minister who spotted the offending garment in his pocket, and then just what were his feelings when his pretty wife modelled it at the top of their stairs? Surely he didn’t experience anything sinful, did he? Well, did he?
Rich Sutcliffe, in his pyjamas and dressing gown, gave us a very poignant childhood memory, of which he cannot rid himself, even though he is a grown man. As a little boy, he had admired the skills of an older boy who had a catapult, and who liked to take pot shots of tin cans, cats, dogs, anything really. Our little boy had made himself a catapult with his whittling knife and some elastic he found in a drawer. Out practising with his new toy, he spotted a robin, and, never thinking his aim would be accurate or that the bird would not fly away in time, he was horror stricken to have caused the death of the innocent little creature. Making a little funeral pyre for the robin out of all his boyhood treasures, such as an old Cup Final ticket and other things he considered precious was not enough. Nothing would ever, ever be enough.
John Anderson’s Last Chance gave us an insight into a very creepy man, and anyone who knows John will also know he is anything but creepy. His character, having always been seen as somewhat odd by his schoolmates, has spent his adulthood portraying himself as a grieving widower in order to conceal his real status as a middle aged virgin. However, he meets Hannah and invites her round for a meal. While he is waiting for his guest, the phone rings; Hannah has had second thoughts. Oh dear, the usual rejection then, but the phone rings again. Hannah has changed her mind! Is he filled with relief and delight? No! How dare she treat him so condescendingly! Who does she think she is? She must be punished, surely…
Wendy Milner’s very touching Just Another Saturday saw a genteel lady ‘of uncertain years’ making astute observations as she goes about her humdrum little life. She notices much more than people think!
Bob Kendall had us in stitches with his Get Away. His character had been persuaded to go on holiday with his wife, not to Bridlington nor Morecambe, nor to anywhere else where they ‘speak proper English like normal people,’ but, horror of horrors to MaJorca, yes, Majorca with a J! BUT he has never flown before, and the only way he can keep the heavy aircraft full of heavy people and heavy luggage up in the air is by concentrating and focussing on the word ‘up,’ much to the consternation of his fellow passengers, who assume he knows something they don’t!
Pam and David Whatley-Holmes in Interactive were a couple who had been married too long. Suddenly each could see their house just as they had always wanted it to be, though both saw it differently. Was there really poison in the ice in the G&T? Were they alive, or perhaps not?
How did pretty Paula Vickers manage to look a frumpy thirty years older than she is to play A Hard Woman? Her character is a long way off being hard, but that is how her family perceives her. We heard of several episodes which had touched her in a way her family would not have troubled to understand. Perhaps that was her problem.
Zarina Belk performed Tidying Up, is a tale of a wife in an ordinary home who became increasingly infuriated by her husband’s insistence on symmetry in everything. And that meant EVERYTHING. From home decorations and sitting arrangements in the sitting room, to the positioning of plants in the garden and piles of paint tins in the garage. There even had to be symmetry in the marital bed on their wedding day. Then one day on a visit to the supermarket she saw a pile of tins falling over because one was un-balanced. And that gave her the idea. She re-built the pile of paint in the garage but with one crucial weakness in its stability. Then she waited! At the end we realised she was telling us this story on returning home from the funeral. Zarina performed the piece beautifully without any sense of excess. This may be her swan song for the Players as she has now moved to Lincoln. Her acting and her production skills will be sorely missed. She has worked incredibly hard for The Players over many years in virtually every role imaginable, including committee duties.
Mark Bamforth and Jane Ellison-Bates performed Tea and Roses, playing a middle aged couple whose marriage had fallen on dreariness. Part of their tea time talk in the sitting room was polite if a little petulant but at least it was shared, whereas the other part was directed by each person separately to the audience, and was definitely not being shared between them. In this part we saw what was really happening. The marriage had already fallen apart and both were planning the demise of the other. The problem, as we found out at the very end, was that they had chosen the same route to freedom which entailed popping some poison into their Earl Grey during the same afternoon tea. A very clever piece of writing. Jane and Mark are consummate actors and their relaxed performance was a joy. I only hope they do not take their work home.
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Carole Charlton
Finally we had a wonderful performance from Carole Charlton, Keith’s daughter, who gave a portrait of a long suffering mother of four, necessitating mountains of washing and other housework, but trying hard not to be swallowed up by it all, despite the efforts of her children to spend as much effort as possible on their indolence.
Grassington Players can rightly be proud to have put on an entertainment of such a high calibre of performance, aided of course, by the tireless backstage people ensuring the set and technical effects for each cameo ran smoothly and without interruption.