One For The Road

Will Russell’s play is about the tensions between conformity and rebellion amongst a group of friends with working class roots.  It’s set in the early 1980s, when everyone is becoming middle class.  Dennis and Pauline (Andrew Jenks and Helen Symes) are holding a dinner party, rather against his wishes.  Dennis still wants to be the rebel he was in his younger days.  Pauline wants to fit in with the pretentions of the new housing development to which they have recently moved, where the tone is set by the pretentious Jane (Anna Rose) and her more laid-back husband Roger (Lucas Curnow).  Jane has clearly acquired all her standards for middle class behaviour from avid study of the Sunday supplements, and is keep to impose those rules on everyone else.  The other dinner party guests are Dennis’s parents who never appear on stage, but provide the comedy turn via a series of phone calls.

I liked the set, with a view from the lounge/diner into a neat fitted kitchen, but it could have done with a larger table - one that looked feasible for a party of six.  This would have crowded the set a little bit, but would have forced a change in the rather linear layout, changing the dynamics of the interplay between the characters in some of the scenes.

It’s set in west Lancashire.  Dennis and Pauline sported Lancashire accents with working class roots whilst Jane spoke in Affected Northern Posh - an accent entirely in line with her pretentions.  (I’ve mingled with accents like that.)  Lucas Curnow didn’t attempt a Lancashire accent.  I have great sympathy with this, having, on occasion, sent an attempted Scots accent around all corners of the British Isles, but his part in particular was written somewhere between Manchester and Liverpool and using expressions like “eh, Kiddo” (the equivalent of the Southampton “oi, Nipper”) doesn’t really work in any other accent.  I think, on the whole, it would have been better to exercise the director’s red pen and cut Roger’s regional expressions, rather than draw attention to them.

Andrew Jenks did a great job of bringing out the frustrations of his character - his desire to rebel and take to the road coupled with a hesitation about desertion.  The roles of the two women are, in their different ways, written in a much more controlled and understated way, and, in my view, were played to perfection.

© NODA CIO. All rights reserved.