KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS till 19 October
Pitlochry
KIND HEARTS & CORONETS
adapted by Giles Croft from the screenplay by Robert Hamer and John Dighton
Pitlochry Festival Theatre In rep to 19 October 2005
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Wed & Sat 2pm
Runs 2hr 20min One interval
TICKETS: 01796 484626
Review: Timothy Ramsden 20 August
Death is fun, but love’s hard going.
This is Pitlochry in fun mode. There’s little evidence of the darker tones in Robert Hamer’s Ealing Comedy, let alone the Edwardian novel it freely adapts, where Louis Mazzini, the serial killer focused on one family whose echelons he climbs through his crimes, had been Jewish rather than Italian, the issues of class and wealth mixed with anti-Semitism.
The Ealing film’s famous for Alec Guinness’s portrayal of all the D’Ascoyne family victims who block Louis’ way to inheriting the family title and fortune. It was fortunate for the film’s producers they had Guinness, a leading actor who already acquiring a reputation for his infinite ability to change utterly with each part he played. (The critic J C Trewin said Guinness was the only actor he knew in which there was no trace of the performer’s own physical or vocal characteristics in any part he played.)
Without that, what? Croft, Pitlochry and director Richard Baron go for fun with staging. Class resentment is lightly handled, D’Ascoynes swiftly disposed of. There’s even room for Louis to be glad natural causes remove the necessity of killing the most decent D’Ascotyne around. Occasionally, it would have been good to see the staging go a bit further (it would have been nice to see the miniature balloon flying across the rear stage with one fated family member actually struck by the arrow that brings it down).
But as small scenic units pull on and push off on stage trucks and people whiz past on bikes there’s good-humoured inventiveness to the sometimes outlandish, sometimes extremely simple disposal methods. And the actors, in an adaptation that makes a virtue of its small-size cast number, all handle the comic grotesquerie in an accomplished manner.
If there’s a darker element to the adaptation it lies in the prison scenes framing the action, which seem less developed than in Croft’s own premiere of the adaptation at Watford some years back. It’s notable too that some of the strongest expression of feeling come not when murder but rival love’s in the air. Now, that is the very devil.
Louis: Hywel Morgan
The D’Ascoynes: Gregory Gudgeon
Sibella: Aoibheann O’ Hara
Lionel: Robin Harvey Edwards
Edith: Helen Logan
Maud: Kezia Burrows
Director: Richard Baron
Designer/Costume:Ken Harrison
Lighting: Jeanine Davies
2005-10-17 09:47:26