ENGAGED. In rep to 14 October.

Pitlochry

ENGAGED
by W.S. Gilbert

Pitlochry Festival Theatre In rep to 14 October 2004
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Wed & Sat 2pm
Runs 2hr 40min Two intervals

TICKETS: 01796 484626
boxoffice@pitlochry.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 1 May

Pitlochry's new season opens with a splendid five minutes, followed by a dull two hours.A new director, its box-office opened-out and made more welcoming, and the sun shining; what more could be wanted for Pitlochry's summer? There's the usual neat middle-brow mix of plays, with some adventure and rarities among more familiar titles. The curtain goes up on a couple of splendid sets for Gilbert's Engaged, capturing both Victorian London's idea of a Balmoralised rural Scotland, and an elegant metropolitan household resembling the foyer of some grand hotel, Turkish Bath or brothel.

Lovely to look at, it should be delightful to listen to as well, with Gilbert undermining sentimental notions of simple Caledonian peasantry (very welcoming, at a price) and idealised love (very much aware of the bottom line before converting itself into marriage).

With one character's awful stare and another's incapacity to see a woman without falling for her, Gilbert deploys the kind of character tic he would use repeatedly in the Savoy operas with Sullivan the kind of thing that equally merciless French farceur Feydeau also employed to expose the lunacy lurking in the mundane.

But multi-lover Cheviot Hill (the backbone of English upper-class assiduity) needs more than the very limited range - from A to B with occasional excursions to C - of facial and vocal expressions that Conrad Hornby provides.

A theatre set in idyllic Scottish hills might be expected to do the Scots folk well, and they do; Helen Logan calculating when not simpering, Steven McNicoll an ardent wooer and a confident rogue. Otherwise, the women come off better than the men, from whom it's mainly boom and bust. Belvawney's piercing eyes and Symperson's self-interest both count for less than they should.

John Durnin's production seems more interested in looking lovely, creating comic tableaux and reducing Cheviot's romancing to seaside-postcard sauciness (rampant staring at out-front busts soon wears thin) than in making much sense of the plot-humour. Yet there's a fine contrast of fair and dark beauty between Victoria Balnaves' firm-faced Minnie and the cost-counting elegance Franceasca Dymond gives the suitor-swapping Belinda. Like Amanda Bellamy and Emily Pennant-Rea, both suggest what many of these actors might have achieved.

Maggie MacFarlane: Helen Logan
Angus MacLeod: Steven McNicoll
Mrs MacFarlane: Amanda Bellamy
Cheviot Hill: Conrad Hornby
Symperson: Jonathan Battersby
Belinda Treherne: Francesca Dymond
Belvawney: Rory Murray
Major McGillicuddy: Richard Addison
Minnie Symperson: Victoria Balnaves
Parker: Emily Pennant-Rea

Director: John Durnin
Designer: Sarah-Jane McClelland
Lighting: Mark Pritchard
Costume: Monika Nisbet
Assistant director: Kate Nelson

2004-05-04 03:01:51