PURVIS. To 8 September.

Scarborough/Tour

PURVIS
by Nick Warburton

Stephen Joseph Theatre (Restaurant) To 28 August
7, 10, 15, 18, 23, 28 August 1.10pm also tour to 8 September 2006
Runs 55min No interval

TICKETS: 01723 370541
www.sjt.uk.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 August

The wrong man for the job makes for a right good laugh.
Nick Warburton possibly starts a new genre of plays set in an Anglican vestry with this story about loss of confidence and control, while reviving a theme that fascinated the younger Alan Ayckbourn in his early plays for this theatre: middle-class English diffidence.

Rachel is the vicarious means of communication between her vicar husband Edward and parish newcomer, bluff, well-intentioned, middle-aged widower Purvis. He’s someone to take people up on offers at once, so when she talks about him becoming part of the church community it’s only moments before he becomes church Health & Safety Officer.

The blundering Purvis is the worst character for such a job since Cherry Orchard's accident-prone Yepikhodov. Warburton has a neat way of implying the disasters that follow, letting the audience find their own way to working them out. But, with one exception, the personal injuries afflicting clergy and congregation are reported rather than seen.

Tamara Harvey’s production augments these, via some nifty stage-management, with the apparent auto-destruction of a set in which virtually everything goes awry. It’s a cheat; if these things are also Purvis’s fault, the play should have shown them happening at his hand. But it theatricalises the story amusingly.

It’s a shame Warburton doesn’t play more on the wilder impact of Health & Safety rules, preferring some more fanciful material. But the action’s impeccably played by Tim Frances’s Purvis, so unaware of himself (or so coiled in defence mechanisms against having to accept his problems) he never listens, and misinterprets everything till the end.

And by Elaine Claxton’s Rachel, whose cheerful manner and innate politeness struggle to survive as long as possible before the truth about Purvis has to be spoken to his face. Rachel’s the kind of character probably last seen in the seventies – later women, even of her class and generation would be more self-confident (though such a generalisation doesn’t always survive a look around).

And Purvis manages, unintentionally, to expose faultlines trembling under the clerical marriage, neatly colouring the action’s otherwise straightforward comic progress. There are certainly worse ways to spend a Scarborough lunchtime.

Rachel: Elaine Claxton
Purvis: Tim Frances

Director: Tamara Harvey
Designer: Michael Roberts
Sound: Steve Carley

2006-08-04 11:39:49