Quartet

There are a lot of big laughs in Ronald Harwood’s script.  Most of these seem to come from the earthy Wilf (Noel Thorpe-Tracey) making lewd suggestions about Cissy (Ros Liddiard) whilst she is safe in a world of her own, isolated by her headphones.  There are also a lot of call-backs, with jokes set-up early on being reprised later in the script.  The plot - with fractious people becoming reconciled and working together towards a performance - is a common one (it’s the old folks’ version of High School Musical), but it is given a massive twist by the self-knowledge of the four faded operatic leads, reunited in a retirement home: they know their voices are not what they were, and that if they perform they will be a disappointment to themselves.

The characters are beautifully written and were wonderfully played.  Jan Spiers was tremendous as Jean, the former operatic diva who still expects the world to revolve around her and dispenses unthinking put-downs to everyone else.  The fourth member of the quartet was the cerebral, somewhat diffident Reggie (Richard Martin), whose thorough preparations led him to lecture the others on Verdi only to break off, changing character instantly, to hurl abuse at the passing (unseen) care-worker with whom he is at war over the contents of his breakfast.

We get a lot of the characters’ back-stories through soliloquy.  These start as a natural part of a conversation, but the characters go off into a world of their own, which director Peter Liddiard and lighting designer David James highlighted by fading out the background, leaving the speaker reliving old memories in a spotlight.

The set was split between a small patio area, bordered by climbing roses, and a sitting room, the doorway of which was crowned by a tasteful semi-circular window.  The sitting room doubled as the dressing room in which the quartet prepared for their final performance, and then the performance stage itself.  During the performance scene, the set morphed into the final fantasy sequence as the quartet recreated their past performance of Rigoletto (the quartet from Act 3) by miming to their own recording (something the actors did with amazing fidelity). The constraints of the Chesil theatre space meant that this created a hiatus in the scene, as a staircase was trucked into place, but by this point the audience didn’t mind, being so wrapped-up in the production and willing the characters to succeed.

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