LAST TRAIN TO NIBROC. To 6 March 2004
Tour
LAST TRAIN TO NIBROC
by Arlene Hutton
New Perspectives Theatre Company Tour to 6 March 2004
Runs 1hr 25min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 5 November at New End Theatre, London
You laugh, you cry; you know the kind of thing. Plastic theatre given a high-gloss production.Last Train stopped off at New End mid-journey. Its all-stations tour will take it to larger, village hall audiences, cheered by the thrills of the raffle and the performance as social event. Nor will they take place at 9pm, as in Hampstead. Strangely, for this afternoon tea of a show was late night companion to George F. Walker's Problem Child, a pint-of-lager play if there ever was.
Arlene Hunter's two-hander brings boy and girl together. They meet, they're opposites. No way will they make it together. Result of course they make it together. Feelgood runs through the piece like Brighton' through a stick of rock. And no-one with a speck of unsceptical humanity in them can fail to sigh for one, and root for both, these opposites together in early 1940s America.
You can tell the types from the first, rail-carriage scene (wherever they meet, there are 2-seats to bring them together). At first, both performances seem a little too keen on signalling character by gesture and expression. Alex Moggridge's Raleigh is all loose-limbed happiness a would-be writer, the cheerfully unmilitary sort the forces get during wartime. Catherine McCarthy's May's an all-religious girl from sheltered background, twitchily nervous in the face of reality, yet sure of her principles in theory.
Hutton manipulates the relationship with gentle ferocity. Each swings up and down, though never too far for their young Kentucky temperaments to cope. Unmoveable obstacles, such as May's sweetheart, get the plotline heave-ho the moment they've finished their function as suspenders of audience disbelief (Oh, but she can never marry him, when there's that other boy ').
Reader, she does marry him, and you know it from the start, for all the detail in Patrick Sandford's scrupulous production. It could have relaxed at times; maybe a small Hampstead audience made things a little too brisk for their own good (hard to linger when there's hardly any audience to provide reactions).
There are more vibrant pieces for the well-established New Perspectives to tour, but this gentle, uncomplicated love-story is skilfully enough sewn together to find favour with some. Rocking-chair theatre, perhaps, but done with a good will.
Raleigh: Alex Moggridge
May: Catherine McCarthy
Musician: Rob Brown
Director: Patrick Sandford
Designer: Juliet Shillingford
Lighting: Mark Dymock
2003-11-13 01:35:31