The Vicar of Dibley: The Holy Trinity

Along with Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers, Hi De Hi and the like, the Vicar of Dibley is rarely off our screens and some fans can even quote large chunks of the script verbatim, so tampering with one of the crown jewels of TV comedy can take companies into dangerous territory.  Full marks then to Curtain Up! Productions for not only being brave enough to do it, but making this their third visit to the village.

As with their two earlier visits, The Holy Trinity has been adapted for the stage from the TV episodes and picks up the story with the Christening of Alice and Hugo’s daughter. There’s also the hint of love on the horizon for our favourite vicar, Geraldine, and the prospect of Dibley being turned into a reservoir.

The setting – the Church of St John the Baptist in Rowlands Castle – could not have been more perfect, with the huge stained glass window providing the backdrop behind the half-timbered set (well made by the Dulakes). Sensibly, head mics were used by all the cast and, along with well-timed sound effects and radio broadcasts by Amanda Clowes and Tricia Roberts, the sound quality was excellent. Costumes were well-chosen and the lighting was most effective. I must also mention the programme: full of information and cleverly formatted as a Parish Newsletter.

The cast of Dibley villagers was virtually unchanged from the society’s previous productions, so they were well practiced in the nuances of the characters and this showed in the quality of the end result.

Samantha Spivey provided a very strong lead as Geraldine Grainger, looking and sounding very much as we would expect and delivering her lines with great comic timing, and exasperation! Nadine Darnley De Salis was perfect as dippy verger Alice, delightfully vague and unworldly. She was well matched by Ryan Richards, new to the role of Hugo Horton, but with all his idiosyncratic mannerisms and vocal tics. Hugo and Alice doing “bunny paws” to each other was just wonderfully sweet. Mark De Salis had the right amount of pomposity for David Horton and the scene where he tried to make himself more modern to appeal to Geraldine was so funny!

As the other parishioners, Mike Powell was perfectly revolting as farmer Owen Newitt (I  mean that as a compliment),  Graham Cranmer had Frank Pickle’s pedantry off to a t, while Steve Day made Jim “No, no, no” Trott rather loveable and Jayne Green as Leticia Cropley horrified us all with the concoctions that appeared from her kitchen.

While all the humour of the original scripts comes through strongly, my only slight reservation with these adaptations is that on TV you can change scenes very quickly, but on stage you can’t. And so the twelve scenes in Act 1 and fifteen in Act 2 – some of them very short - make for a rather disjointed play, even though the stage crew were swift and efficient and, between some scenes, we were treated to the beautiful singing of the St Barnabus Belles. This is a fault with the script, not the cast or crew.

Thank you Curtain Up! for taking us on another hilarious trip to Dibley, with its wealth of eccentric characters and classic comic moments. It was a great evening’s entertainment and I left aching from laughing so much.

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