THE MAN WITH TWO GAFFERS. To 9 December.

Tour

THE MAN WITH TWO GAFFERS
by Blake Morrison adapted from Carlo Goldoni

Northern Broadsides Tour to 9 December 2006
Runs 2hr 20min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 September at The Lowry Salford

Trouble enough up at t’t’inn
When Northern Broadsides mob drops in.
Blake Morrison’s pushed Carlo Goldoni’s Venetian comedy a century on from its mid-18th century original, setting the play formerly known as The Servant of Two Masters in the North Yorkshire market town of Skipton around 1850.

His rediscovered Yorkshire dialect - people say what they mean in expressive, colourful terms - gives Goldoni’s story a rich, direct flavour. The servant (Goldoni’s Truffaldino, Morrison’s Dodge, also known as Cheetham) opportunistically picks up two wage packets by serving 2 newly-arrived masters, one of them a mistress, who manage not to meet till the last act, despite holing up in the same hostelry.

Both sound and sense acquire strength through having a local habitation that’s more specific, and a language frankly more flavoursome, than standard English plus vaguely Estuary, Mummerset or all-purpose northern servants and yokels.

The northern vocabulary works especially well with characters whose heirs would sit on the Cleckheaton omnibus or become Mondeo-man/woman. Classically-based English gains is fine for logic and reason, but Two Gaffers ’its thee o’er ’ead wi’ it’s clumping great vividness and imagery. Thou knows thou’s been insulted when thou’s upset someone in our Blake’s Skipton.

Yet Morrison has fun with cod-Northernisms as the exaggerated glottal articles repeatedly show (look at t’t’ intro to this-‘ere review to get t’t’point). And the hard-consonanted words, thumping like great clods of turf, have an expressive rhythmic springiness; no-one hangs around in this language.

Industry lies behind events, a businessman’s daughter’s being married-off for commercial reasons, though Victoria Fleming’s determined Victorian miss, striding with arms so assertive they seem to power her finely-stylised movement, isn’t going to let anyone take her for a ride. There are several other flavoursome performances, though, possibly by directing and starring, Barrie Rutter lets some passages of generalised northern roaring slip through.

But there’s a fine ballet involving swinging-doors in the scene where Dodge/Cheetham serves his 2 employers meals in different rooms simultaneously. Rutter’s maturity gives Dodge, found hungry on a towpath, a pathetic edge, out of which spirals a cornucopia of comic poses, expressions and cadences, creating comedy and a sense of wonder in a performance to treasure.

Samuel Towler: Dicken Ashworth
Clarice Towler: Victoria Fleming
Rev Lumb: Roy North
Stephen Lumb: Matt Connor
Charlotte Ramsey: Kate Ambler
Frank Floers: Simon Holland Roberts
Bill Beckwith: Simeon Truby
Arthur Dodge: Barrie Rutter
Esme Dean: Nicola Sanderson

Director: Barrie Rutter
Designer: Leslie Travers
Lighting: Judith Cloke
Music: Simeon Truby

2006-09-27 11:11:14