Out of Focus

~~It is not easy to go straight into a play and have so many lines to say starting with a very long speech but Gloria Elford-Box did this when she played Helen Beever, a cross between Hattie Jacques as the school mistress in one of her Carry On films and Joyce Grenfell in St Tinian’s. She was perfect, in fact so perfect that you could easily identify someone who is just like her. A very officious busy body who thinks no-one can do anything without her help when in fact things run much more smoothly without her.
The play takes place in a community centre which has been double booked, or so it seems when in fact I am not sure whether this was treble booked or whether there had been four bookings taken at the same time!
It was hilarious and could not have been done any better had there been a group of professional actors playing the parts.
When Helen turns up at the centre she immediately thinks Sue Dixon is a new staff member when in fact Sue, played excellently by Jill Connell, had come along to play badminton, this was the first of the double bookings as Helen has her Brownies there for a meeting. The next of the bookings is a talk and slides to be given by Leonard Trotter, played with exuberance by Mark Stones; he was the “Nerd” of the show who has an abundance of slides and talks about anything but wonders why he never gets a recall. Mark was perfect and again I am sure many audience members could identify someone with exactly the same attributes as Leonard.
We then have another booking in the guise of Gaynor Robinson who played the Vicar’s wife Evonne Duckworth, the very nervous “director” who could not really direct herself out of the supermarket car park, later in the second act when she becomes very drunk we hear about her vicar husband and what she really thinks about him.
In and amongst all this action we have Frank Bardsley as Bob Enfield, Kath Enfield, his wife, played by Claire Martin, Lee Sanderson as Wayne Bryant, Stuart Roxburgh as David Wright and Samantha Martin as Linda Hammond, all played expertly well to compliment this farce.
It was good to see so many new faces in this production as well as a new director, Sue Martin, who must be very proud of all her actors.
Well done and thank you for a most enjoyable evening.

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