It is Christmas Eve 1999 and Pauline (Erin Geraghty) has booked Nae-Mind cottage in the Scottish Highlands for her first Christmas since being widowed.
Her neighbour’s Parrot Samson is proving to be too noisy, her relationships with her four children are strained and she just wants to be by herself at Christmas.
However, the house has also been booked by Jane (Rosie Coles) who is waiting for her boyfriend Dave, who is already married to someone else and never turns up. Later Fred (Danny Horn) also arrives, guitar in hand, looking to get his act together following an ultimatum from his girlfriend Michelle.
Add to the mix Andie (Beck Grieg), a near-mute Nirvana fan with secrets of their own, and this is the Christmas break that none of them had expected.
In due course, the quartet bond and secrets are shared. In their first year, they form The Bah Humbug Club – the rules of which are that they don’t see anything of each other throughout the year but they will always meet, when they can and when they want to.
Throughout the next 23 yearswe see the relationships between the four cast members develop and become richer. As time goes on, they drift apart and go years without seeing each other, but there is always a thread to keep them bound together.
The denouement of the play is a bit of a cliché, but in times like the ones we are all looking for, some feel-good jollity is not always a bad thing.
The play is well written by Carolyn Scott Jeffs, and plots the life and developments of the four main protagonists, but only in the natural confines of the narrative.
We learn only the basics of their lives in the time when they are together, but the outside world is seen nevertheless.
The Bah Humbug club is an uplifting Christmas tale, with a disparate group of characters pushed together, having their lives changed as a result of it. The rules of tradition are all in place – there is a wedding, true love is found, family rifts are healed, success is enjoyed, failure is endured, and careers and loves are lost.
Some rifts are healed, some are not, but it is in the quiet moments between the big events where the true spirit of the play is found.
The play runs at the Lichfield Garrick until 27th December.
