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THREE'S COMPANY
Freehold Theatre Company Reviewed by Jane Sunderland Like a good short story, a short play can be a gem, and even more so if there are more than one of them. Three’s Company, directed by Alan Matthews, is a mini-Festival of three two-person plays: Standing in the Light (Marian McCraith of the Blue Lizard Theatre Company), Talk to Me (Steve Ashton, another Blue Lizard, who also plays Derek) and High Water (Nick Darke, who sadly died in 2005 at the age of 56). Each of the excellent actors appears in two of the plays, giving three different pairs. The intimate setting of the Gregson hall in Lancaster works well for the two interiors (characterised by pictures of different musicians on the walls) and spot of North Cornish beach. When just two characters collide on stage, we sometimes feel we’ve been there before. So that in Standing in the Light, when Helena (Erica Nash) takes Carl (Kyle Oram) into her house after having run into him in her car on a dark rainy Manchester night, it’s not surprising that, despite their differences, they share existential preoccupations, wine, confidences and home truths, and emerge the happier (with some sax – yes, sax - thrown in for good measure). Or that in the ‘modern classic’ High Water, in the process of looking for wreckage and untangling rope on the beach, the Cornishman Slinger (Steve Ashton) turns out to be the father of upper class holidaymaker Griff (Kyle Oram) who is visiting where his mother used to live, and who talks less and less as he learns more and more. But they’re both good stories, and very well done. The real surprise for the audience in terms of a non-predictable plot is Talk to Me. Derek, who apparently has learning difficulties, a speech impediment and posture problems, and who lives in a local authority hostel where he receives weekly visits from his support worker Bess (Erica Nash), turns out to be not what he seems. Closely related to that (and what might explain his metamorphoses) are his distinctly non-professional feelings for the genuinely nice but very professional, unsuspecting Bess. The dramatic irony that this situation creates is very, very creepy, and the play resists categorisation into horror, tragedy or comedy. Founded in 1995, Freehold Theatre Company have toured productions of plays by Harold Pinter, Brian Friel, D.H. Lawrence, Terry Johnson, Ronald Harwood and Alan Bennett throughout the North-West. Three’s Company is their thirteenth major project. I look forward to the fourteenth. As the Gregson was full tonight, I don’t expect to be alone there. Jane Sunderland © 12/4/07 If you missed Three’s Company, you can still catch it at: Caldbeck Village Hall Torpenhow Village Hall The Heron Theatre, Beetham, Cumbria The Kirkgate Centre, Kirkgate, Cockermouth The Harlequin Theatre, Queen St, Northwich Links:
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