WHAT better start to the weekend than with a night with tears and laughter in equal abundance?  Well that's what audiences got this weekend at Riding Mill Drama Group's production of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads.  The society had chosen a selection of four of the six monologues from the series, but due to a licensing quirk, were only able to perform three on any given night.  On Friday, the audience was treated to A Lady of Letters A Cream Cracker under the Settee and A Chip in the Sugar.  But before the night even began, the audience already had something to be impressed about, in the shape of the newly refurbished parish hall.  An airy glass entrance area made an ideal foyer, allowing the space to be warmly welcomed and shown through to your seats by the waiting front of house staff. The area also meant the audience had somewhere to retire to in the intervals to use the facilities and purchase refreshments.  But, back to the drama, and the main reason why most people had come along.  The evening opened with Hazel Osmond’s portrayal of Irene in A Lady of Letters'.

This monologue looks at the lonely life of a spinster, who lands herself in prison after a barrage of abusive letters to local people and organisations. Hazel, along with her fellow actors, put on a commendable Yorkshire accent for the piece, Bennett being a Yorkshireman himself. The monologues are often presented in this way. Her disdain at the new neighbours, who couldn't even put a cloth on the tea table, was expertly expressed from the curl of her nose to the lift of her eyebrow. The pauses in her delivery were perfectly timed to maximise both the comic effect of some lines whilst marking the poignancy of others. An audible stillness fell upon the audience as Irene disclosed the death of a child, whom she had assumed was suffering neglect. But she was swift in providing comic relief and the audience was soon back in humorous mood as she rattled off how happy she had become now she was in prison.  All the monologues were interspersed with music to allow for breaks and scene changes or alterations where necessary and in A Lady of Letters the choice of Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles really resonated with the audience, who felt Irene's pain at being one of so many “lonely people" in life.

Next up after an interval, in which this reviewer won the raffle prize of stamps, cream crackers and a bag of sugar, was A Cream Cracker under the Settee. A personal favourite of mine, this monologue has fewer deliberately funny lines and is a more emotional look at how old age and isolation can affect a person. Doris, played by April Joslin, made a good old woman who, determined to keep her independence, falls while trying to dust the picture rail. She impersonated her nemesis, the cleaner Zulema, with a good foreign accent and got several laughs from the audience in the jokes about Zulema's apparent aversion to proper cleaning.

Doris represents traditional values and April showed her passion and belief in those values in her face, contrasting that with the shock and disgust with which she addressed the boy ‘spending a penny' in her garden. Her pain was only too apparent, both the physical at having injured herself and the emotional at having given birth to a still-born child. The raw emotion on display was heartfelt and brought more than just one tear to the eye for many audience members. And for the final piece, the task fell to Ian Johnston to play Graeme, in A Chip in the Sugar. This Freudian piece looks at the close relationship between one man and his mother and the underlying issues of mental illness and homosexuality. Ian's performance was charged with meaning in his understated delivery of Graeme's oft repeated retort “I didn't say anything." He could have done with being a little more on edge when he kept checking for house watchers at the window but otherwise his performance was good. Neither as funny as Irene or as sad as Doris, Graeme was probably the most difficult character to portray on the night but it was a job well done by Ian, who drew plenty of laughs from the audience especially in his rendition of Mam discussing religion with the vicar. All three actors did a magnificent job of learning each monologue with the oh-so-important dramatic pauses timed exactly right for maximum effect in all three pieces. The sets were well thought out and their simplicity complemented rather than drew attention away from the words and characters themselves. Bravo, is all that is left to say.

 

Rebecca Dixon Hexham Courant