Reviews

While the Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds has been undergoing refurbishment they've been researching what sort of plays and shows would have been staged there. One of the results has been this production which they've called A Night At The Theatre.

The premise is that Mr Buckstone (Graham Howes) and two of his actors from Buckstone's Strolling Players arrive at the venue (Ickworth House's West Wing in this case) and get news that the rest of the cast are stuck elsewhere (probably drunk) and the three who've made it have to pull a show together quickly. Mrs McNamara (Janet Greaves) fears that a "half-witted and inbred" rural audience won't care, but Buckstone decides we should still be treated to an impromptu variety show featuring poetry, songs, sketches and a full play - the Victorian farce Box & Cox.

Mrs McNamara opens with a poetry reading from Robert Browning's Confessional, then Mr Cummins (Luke Shaw), Mrs McNamara and Mr Buckstone sing ballads and comic songs. They're mildly amusing and well performed but the best bits of the evening are the dramas.

Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures (by Douglas William Jerrold, 1840s) tells of a henpecked husband remembering his late wife's rants from her bed - almost like an Alan Bennett chronicle of a dead marriage. Fairly Taken In (by Marie-Therese Kemble, 1805) is more of a farce where one Lady Julia disguises herself as she turns the tables on her fiance who tries to spy on her while in disguise. In his BBC interview, actor Luke Shaw describes it as 'Allo, 'Allo two centuries ago and he's not wrong.

Box and Cox

The highlight of the evening is another farce which takes up the whole of the second half of the evening - John Maddison Morton's Box & Cox which was apparently an immediate big hit when it was first performed in 1847. Landlady Mrs Bouncer is getting double her money for a bedsit by renting it to Mr Box during the day after his nightshift and to Mr Cox during the night after his dayshift (or is it the other way round?). It turns out they've both been engaged to the same girl and much hilarity ensues.

Mrs McNamara's headstand

It reminded me very much of Blackadder or some of PG Wodehouse's farcical plots and shows that the Theatre Royal's attempts to delve back into Georgian and Victorian works are still highly relevant.

Earlier in the interludes the cast discuss what they can do next, and at the end we're finally treated to Mrs McNamara's headstand while doing an impression of a bicycle horn. Unfortunately we couldn't quite hear the horn where we were sitting, but the bloomers were very impressive.

This was the first theatre event at Ickworth House's West Wing and while it's obviously a fantastic setting, it was quite difficult to see all the action. There was no stage and the first ten or so rows of the audience were on the same level. If you were sitting in the tenth row you could often only see the tops of the actors heads if they weren't standing up.

The show has been produced in conjunction with the Georgian Theatre Royal in Richmond, North Yorkshire. It's tour of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire continues with dates in Thurston, Hartest, Brandon, Charsfield, Huntingdon and Bury St Edmunds. Check the Theatre Royal website for full details>>