THE HOLLY AND THE IVY. To 20 March.

Tour

THE HOLLY AND THE IVY
by Wynyward Browne

Middle Ground Theatre Company Tour to 20 March 2004
Review: Timothy Ramsden 2 February at Swan Theatre Worcester

Dependable but uninspiring revival.They don't write them like this 1948 family Christmas drama any more haven't for a long time. It's a bit of a shock to discover they still produce them this way. The sets, like the performances, are generally solid and realistic but unimaginative.

These actors can shape a sentence. But there's no overall dynamism, and only a sluggish rhythm. Some performances have the limited charm of recalling what passed for realism fifty years ago - only a few show signs of greater life.

This was serious prose realism in an age when elegant verse drama was touted as theatre's way ahead. It wasn't, and middle-class rumination like this soon went in the same dustbin as the fanciful poetry. Yet it's fascinating, watching Rachel Blenkiron's 29-year old sacrifice her hope of marriage to look after her aged clerical dad, to reflect her older sister could have been the woman who lay by a rented, unlit gas fire in suicidal frustration at the opening of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea.

Her younger sister, or niece, if she were called Alison, might have become the polite girl who ran to angry freedom with John Osborne's irate young sweet-stall holder in 1956. For playwright Wynyard Browne who had considerable success with this piece in post-war England was a socialist with more leftward commitment than Rattigan and Osborne together (not hard, admittedly) and the question of real values lies under the action, surfacing occasionally.

In Margaret, the sister sinking into the despair of alcoholism despite her apparent fashionable career success, there's another candidate for Rattigan's suicidal Hester, and a portrait of false values rotting the soul. The production catches her struggle against an offered whisky, while Joy Brook's eyes show awareness of the full glass's whereabouts. But it doesn't follow the struggle though to the moment she succumbs.

And, while Tony Britton shows a fine actor's ability to give a sense of something more than mere realism, Michael Lunney's production could do more to indicate how much this unretiring vicar is simply blind to those around him, how much wilfully oblivious.

Jenny: Rachel Blenkiron
David Paterson: David Mara
Rev Martin Gregory: Tony Britton
Mick: Nathan Hannan
Aunt Lydia: Christine Drummond
Aunt Bridget: Mary Duddy
Cousin Richard: Michael Lunney
Margaret: Joy Brook

Director/Lighting: Michael Lunney
Designer: Ali Gorton

2004-02-05 00:53:08