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We very much enjoyed Lord Arthur last night. Great fun, real pace, very amusing, and excellent characters. The Producer appeared impressively serene throughout!
Many congratulations!
R&D.

The production was so good that I saw the play twice and never stopped laughing. All the cast were excellent and well chosen. Winkelkopf was incredibly funny, his costume, bumbling accent and sense of timing made the production for me.
PM.

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Review by Stuart Manger.

NO CRIME, JUST FUN
Under Susan Garnett, Sedbergh and Dent are having a renaissance of ambitious, entertaining, well-directed theatre. Her run of Dent-based productions has done much to illuminate the local scene. Staging a traditional prosc-arch show like Oscar Wilde’s ‘Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime’ in the round takes real concentration and firm discipline by the entire team. Wilde is not much into serious onstage hi-jinx – so this isn’t standard farce – so if everybody sits, the audience get backs, and if they all stand, it looks like the January sales in an auction warehouse. This production was pretty sure-footed, though there were odd occasions when Graham Dalton looked uncannily like a predatory heron on a river bank seeking whom he may devour!

Susan Garnett is blessed by having a strong central quintet who play against and off each other with uncanny empathy – Ian Dawson, Graham Dalton, Robin Hildrew, Sally Blackburn and the wonderful Elizabeth Dalton. Graham Dalton’s Baines was surely among the best things seen locally for years. Manner, subtle shifts of voice, ideal deportment, life-saving yet majestic presence were utterly authentic, done with style and a fine-tuned but understated comic timing, yet had the intelligence to show the burgeoning, romantic below-stairs affair of the heart in a nicely observed sub-plot with Caroline Lamb’s demure, but secretly ardent maid. I have never seen Ian Dawson so disciplined, and his skilful use of the space, acting with the back and command of the telling pause and eye contact with audience are all critical, and done with aplomb. The temptation is to play Arthur as Bertie Wooster, but Ian Dawson played it straight – result? No mugging and milking, but high-tempo movement, exquisite timing, keeping the often complex and surreal plot lines in play, and never taking the foot off the gas. He and Baines must keep pressing on without appearing to do so, and that is precisely what they did. They are a well-honed and luminary duo.

Wilde specialises in chaperones and aunts who’d give the SAS a fright and in the presence of Sally Blackburn’s steely, acerbic, no-nonsense Lady Julia, you knew that Arthur was in for a devilishly tricky time avoiding beady eyes and whiplash tongue. Quieter but equally deadly was Libby Hartley’s Lady Windermere, whose baleful eyes followed Arthur everywhere, with a crushing, well-judged line in throwaway delivery. Elizabeth Dalton’s ‘mature’ good time girl parasiting off great-nephew with bare-faced cheek and breath-taking regularity was surprisingly a very sympathetic character, thus making Baines’ and Arthur’s attempts to bump her off to fulfil the prophesy and shift the burden of her crippling gambling debts both hilarious yet having a certain rough justice.. Three expertly gloved and suited Witches that would grace the Scottish play! Jenny Robinson’s Sybil came on with spoilt brat tears, but every so often, the eyes would narrow, and she would suddenly show that one day she too would be a mighty force in this monstrous regiment. Does Arthur really know what he is getting into? Another innocent for bumping off was Robin Hildrew’s beautifully observed and irascible Dean of Paddington –weddings and funerals tend to merge in the Paddington brain in a blur, and Wilde uses him cleverly to accelerate some of the best comic business – a delight to see him not played as a doddery loony for a change. Mike Duxbury’s bluff, and wide-eyed charlatan Podgers was a nice little piece of work, but I think I would have been tempted to make Podgers a touch more sinister and sleazier, an obvious second hand car salesman gulling these upper class twits – Wilde was having a swipe at the Madame Blavatsky-type shysters the aristocracy seemed to have taken a shine to, rather like Nancy Regan and her astrologer. Winkelkopf must be a sublime botcher and caricature rent-a-bomber. Jim Kirton certainly had the voice and clothes for it, but maybe his scenes need to be a bit pacier to maintain the comic pressure. Playing comedy like this is rather like crossing a stream with very thin ice – move fast and it’s fun, slow down and the ice cracks under you.

Wilde’s wicked in-joke references to his other plays were delivered with relish – Lady Windermere and Hastings getting cunningly located for the theatre buffs. The lighting team had done a very good job in lighting the central space so evenly – no mean feat with actors both standing and seated in such a confined area in a hall not built for the format– and special effects generally worked with split second timing! Many thanks and congratulations to Susan Garnett and her wardrobe and make-up teams for a great night out. An exceptionally jolly, and very well patronised evening to launch the Sedbergh and Dent Festival season.
© Stuart Manger
 

Dentdale Players
Dent Memorial Hall
April 15th, 16th, 17th 2004

Review by Stuart Manger.

This is everything that community drama should be. Sustained comedy, genuinely characterful acting, an audience of the men and women you see on the street every day! Dentdale Players really did strut their stuff. There was huge delight both on and off stage as Priestley’s beautifully crafted comedy set the rafters roaring on a soggy Dales evening. Susan Garnett’s skilful direction was everywhere evident in her unobtrusively clever choreography of the 14-strong cast round a pocket-handkerchief size stage that suggested the well-to-do Councillor Parker’s best sitting room. The husbands were sober-suited, smug chapel dignitaries, pompous, self-important, blinkered, insensitive, and full of the bluster you only get from small men who become huge fish in very, very small pools. Then Priestley hilariously pulls the rug from under their collective feet, and for two hours they don’t stop falling. Pillars of the community all, but, horrors! NOT wed. 25 years of unknowingly living in sin while full of self-righteousness about how others should behave, notably the new Choirmaster, who commits two sins: firstly, he actually dares to ‘walk out’ in public with a GIRL, but possibly, even more dreadfully, is a SOUTHERNER and all ‘lardy-dar!’ But the Choirmaster has a stick of dynamite in the form of a letter revealing that the six parish stalwarts were “married” 25 years previously by some young curate without the proper spiritual driving licence! The terror of scandal stalks the anniversary party: the Press lurk, an alcoholic photographer, a short-changed, sacked and eavesdropping cook with revenge on her mind, and the rattling skeleton of a lurid boys night out in Blackpool falls out of the cupboard to keep things farcically simmering.
The wonderful trio of the great and good, played as a very slick team by Graham Dalton, Robin Hildrew, and Ian Dawson, were brilliantly ‘managed’ by their astute, no-nonsense wives of Sally Blackburn, Libby Hartley and Elizabeth Dalton respectively. The terrific ensemble of these six was exemplary, and the necessary comic timing was nigh on impeccable. Supporting them - and like the very pro rep writer he was Priestley makes sure everyone does get their turn at the limelight - was Ruby, the I-miss-nothing, effervescent maid of Jayne Calvert, Henry Ormondroyd’s drunken photographer with a real story to tell with some relish, and his sidekick, the exactly right, cheeky reporter, Andrew Woof, the ‘southern’ Choirmaster with the best Messiah for miles in Craig Stephenson, diffidently pursuing the coy Jenny Robinson, with Marjorie Duxbury as the ‘painted lady’ from ‘that night’ in Blackpool all eyelashes and wicked suggestion, together with the once compliant but then outraged vicar of Mike Duxbury, and lastly, but triumphantly, the sublimely anarchic Nancy Murdoch, whose lively face, comic timing and thrill of puncturing small-town pretensions were simply electric. Lighting was ingeniously conceived, the wardrobe and make-up deftly organised, and a heck of a time was had by all. My ‘man of the match’? Elizabeth Dalton - all injured propriety, brilliant asides, a real sense of the greengrocer’s lass who has grimly fought hers and her husband’s way to the top of the town heap and is not going to let go without a fight - oh yes, and the best left hook in the business! Cracking show