April 21, 2010
In the delightfully hospitable space of Wolvercote Village Hall you will find a very special kind of theatre and an excellent cup of tea. Here the St Peter's Players are offering a winning selection of three short plays linked by an interest in revelations. A sardonic, wry, unaffected and wonderfully joyful evening awaits.
In Fay Weldon’s The Reading Group, five very different women try to decide on their next book. Discussion moves between possible titles and personal experience. At first fractious and defensive, then with growing curiosity, and soon with a genuine need to see and evaluate other paths, they discover fragments of each other’s lives, turning over the choices they each have made and the struggle between isolation and love. Partly a play of ideas - here mainly about marriage and its alternatives - the performance works most of all as the representation of a gathering all too familiar: the separate selves who seek, here in a reading group, something new, maybe something life-transforming, only to find again the reality of their unanswered questions and imperfect lives.
We move on to Sour Grapes and Ashes by Nick Warburton, for another gathering, this time around two brightly coloured tins: one containing Father and the other his dog Derrick. Under the intense direction of bereaved son Bernard, family members play out a scene that oscillates between significance and absurdity with some infectiously comic moments. But for comedy, the gem of the evening has to be Warburton's The Last Bread Pudding. Here a group of actors and stage hands discourse their way around the question of Art in a superlatively entertaining and witty mix of aesthetic enquiry, acerbic anti-intellectualism, genuine bewilderment, and a barrage of unforgettable lines (‘I didn’t envisage a speaking role for the bread pudding’).
Through these well-chosen plays, performed with enthusiasm and enjoyment, we revel in the power of theatre to bind and entertain us, yet we are also brought to acknowledge with Warburton’s Denise that ‘everyday life is all there is’. It is because the St Peter’s Players never lose touch with that ordinariness that they hold their audience with such warmth and humour. They play to us and yet they are also among us. And ‘everyday life’ feels a much happier place as a result.
In Fay Weldon’s The Reading Group, five very different women try to decide on their next book. Discussion moves between possible titles and personal experience. At first fractious and defensive, then with growing curiosity, and soon with a genuine need to see and evaluate other paths, they discover fragments of each other’s lives, turning over the choices they each have made and the struggle between isolation and love. Partly a play of ideas - here mainly about marriage and its alternatives - the performance works most of all as the representation of a gathering all too familiar: the separate selves who seek, here in a reading group, something new, maybe something life-transforming, only to find again the reality of their unanswered questions and imperfect lives.
We move on to Sour Grapes and Ashes by Nick Warburton, for another gathering, this time around two brightly coloured tins: one containing Father and the other his dog Derrick. Under the intense direction of bereaved son Bernard, family members play out a scene that oscillates between significance and absurdity with some infectiously comic moments. But for comedy, the gem of the evening has to be Warburton's The Last Bread Pudding. Here a group of actors and stage hands discourse their way around the question of Art in a superlatively entertaining and witty mix of aesthetic enquiry, acerbic anti-intellectualism, genuine bewilderment, and a barrage of unforgettable lines (‘I didn’t envisage a speaking role for the bread pudding’).
Through these well-chosen plays, performed with enthusiasm and enjoyment, we revel in the power of theatre to bind and entertain us, yet we are also brought to acknowledge with Warburton’s Denise that ‘everyday life is all there is’. It is because the St Peter’s Players never lose touch with that ordinariness that they hold their audience with such warmth and humour. They play to us and yet they are also among us. And ‘everyday life’ feels a much happier place as a result.