> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://lichfieldlive.co.uk/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Review: Agnes & Walter: A Little Love Story @ Lichfield Garrick
- URL: https://lichfieldlive.co.uk/review-agnes-walter-a-little-love-story-lichfield-garrick/
- Published: 2012-07-10T07:00:30.000Z
- Updated: 2012-07-09T17:38:45.000Z
- Author: Phil Preece
- Tags: Reviews, What's On, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-07-22 21:41

Festivals are a great opportunity to see new stuff because programmers are always looking out for things to float our jaded culture-vultures’ boats. So I went along to see SMITH dancetheatre’s Agnes & Walter: A Little Love Story ready to be astonished, amused and entertained.

But the Festival programme’s description of the show as “a delightful flight of fancy” which “crosses boundaries of dance and theatre to tell its story through physical and visual performance styles, including dance, physical theatre, clowning and music” turned out to be too optimistic.

What I actually saw was some primitive mime and almost no dance beyond the very basic except in the first section where the chap presumably playing Walter showed real skill hampered by poor choreography. The physical theatre element was hackneyed Movement Level One kind of stuff. Gradually a series of slow almost glacially-paced “events” (and occasionally frenzied ones, to be fair) unfolded centring on a shed whose limited dramatic potential formed the main focus of any action. I saw no clowning at all unless it was the unexplained intrusion of a tall woman to sing a pair of French nightclub songs and fairy-light the shed.

What action there was generally underwhelmed. Sweeping the stage is not drama. Not moving at all is neither mime nor dance. Carrying an electric fan on and off is not sophisticated or original staging. Actors sitting with their backs to the audience isn’t breaking new ground.

Direction often seemed to have been simply, “Well, just do what you can.” This kind of devised-performance approach is fine if the end result is original and connects emotionally with the audience, but here if there was any link at all with the claimed exploration of Thurber’s Secret Life of Walter Mitty it had disappeared completely during the creative process leaving the end product merely a series of bewilderingly unrelated bits of stuff. It’s okay when “devised” pieces work, but this one didn’t.

The good-natured Garrick audience were quite willing to play their part in the business of being entertained – when one of the cast held up a card saying “Applause” they dutifully did it. They also clapped very nicely at the end, being a Festival crowd that knows its manners. But Director Neil Parris should look at how well he transmits his intended message, because it just doesn’t come across.