Tuesday, July 30, 2013

WHAT LARKS !

WHAT LARKS !
Greville Theatre Club at the Three Horseshoes
28.07.13


An agreeably nostalgic evening in the garden of the Three Horseshoes, with poems, spoofs and sketches performed by those talented actors from the Greville, directed by Jan Ford.
She also compiled this "pot-pourri" – something borrowed, something blue – which included literary giants from Jane Austen to Pam Ayres.
A strong start from Carrie Craig as a loquacious lady who gushes over a hapless passer-by [Steve Bradley] whom she takes to be her childhood sweetheart.
Some of the acts were weaker, whiskerier, than that, though it's always nice to be reminded of Gert and Daisy [a beautifully timed Joan and Joyce from Jan Ford and Diana Bradley] or those Hornographic picturehouse parodies ["Dropping Them Over Dover" – a stiff-upper-lip wartime saga with Carol Parradine and Adam Thompson]. We even had an all too brief glimpse of Kitty's Slot, the Victoria Wood/Pat Routledge monologue revived here by Pam Hemming.
Parradine and Thompson also played in Deaf Sentence, moments from the David Lodge novel, very deftly adapted. He sported a villainous moustache to play the cock-sure Corder in what must be the millionth pastiche of Maria Marten, nicely staged. Still almost virgin territory for the parodist, Fifty Shades was re-imagined in gruesomely geriatric guise, and the evening ended with a Carry On Austen travesty, set in Netherparts Hall, complete with candelabra, with Nicholas Blackwell's oleaginous Collins amongst the plucky players.

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