Neighbourhood Watch

The Play Neighbourhood Watch  was written by Alan Ayckbourn and was  premiered in September 2011 at the Stephen Joseph Theatre  Scarborough. “The Stage” reviewer Mark Shenton described the play as "a brilliant social comedy that is also a fierce and provocative political drama".

The play centres around a devoutly Christian brother and sister, Martin and Hilda who move into a middle-class area next to a run-down estate. So, when Martin catches a young intruder climbing over his fence and following several petty crimes by the residents from the nearby estate that had been either ignored or not taken seriously by the police, he decides to form a Neighbourhood Watch Committee and persuades some of his neighbours to join. These members include a nosy woman, a suspicious ex-security officer, their timid musician neighbour Magda and their other neighbour Gareth and his promiscuous wife Amy. However, the committee decides to work on their own without liaising with the Police, so the group end up creating a fenced gated community, with its own security system and their own medieval stocks at the gate. Unfortunately, things get a bit out of hand when Martin has an affair with his neighbour’s wife Amy and his sister Hilda is jealous because she thinks he will leave her on her own and plans revenge with Amy’s husband. In the end the group becomes tyrannical, authoritarian and controlling with the result they alienate the people they are supposed to protect and when Martin’s garden gnome gets broken things escalate and it all ends in violence.

Once again, the company produced an excellent stage set of Martin and Hilda’s very green living room, where all the action takes place which was dressed nicely and with good technical input made an excellent platform for the cast to work on. Costumes which were provided by the cast were also spot on and suited their characters, very well done to all the stage and technical crew.
The play was directed by Debbie Wells who was assisted by Libby Cowburn, they had at their disposal some talented actors and there were also some good comedy moments and interesting characters in this entertaining production. The cast included Adrian Barradell who was spot on as meek pacifist Martin who with his Neighbourhood Watch committee provokes some rather disturbing incidents and Bridgett Welch complemented him well as his jealous and at times manipulative sister Hilda. Finlay Robertson was very comedic in his role as the paranoid ex security man Rod Trusser, but he also highlighted the more worrying aspect of his character’s behaviour well. There was a good performance from Emma Meen as the promiscuous neighbour Amy Janner who manages to seduce upstanding Martin and Amy’s betrayed husband Gareth Janner was played by Jonathan Llyons who managed to convey feelings of suppressed anger against his wife and his situation. Hilda McAughey was also funny as nosy neighbour Dorothy Doggett and Olivia Lloyd gave a nice performance as timid and possibly abused Magda Bradly, giving a touching speech in the second act and her bullying husband Luther Bradley was well played by Toby Hewitt.

Diction and projection was excellent, meaning clarity of words was very good and the story could be followed, but unfortunately there were rather a lot of prompts taken by a number of the cast in this very wordy play and along with some made up dialogue it did affect the pace of the action at times. However, this is a hard play to perform and the cast worked together and supported each other very well producing some very enjoyable interesting characters which resulted in an entertaining production that the audience appeared to enjoy.

Congratulation to Debbie Wells, Libby Cowburn and to all involved in bringing this entertaining production to the stage, thank you for inviting us we had a lovely evening
 

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