There’s something very comforting about sitting in a warm, dark theatre on a wet night watching a play about some well-imagined people and their serious but sortable troubles.
Popular touring company Middle Ground Theatre is currently making a welcome return to the Lichfield Garrick with just such a drama, The Holly and The Ivy, set sometime in the years just after the second world war. It’s the sort of well-made play that writers like Osborne derided at the time but which have always proved popular with the public because they tell coherent, sympathetic stories about real people with recognisable lives. Wynyard Browne’s classic of the genre is no exception.
It may be cosy, but Director Michael Lunney has caught perfectly how this play is no whitewash of human nature. As the family of the Reverend Martin Gregory (the compelling Stuart McGugan) gather at the
vicarage on Christmas Eve we see a family unable to move on in their lives and showing signs of breaking apart,
The vicar at first seems to be that reactionary cliché, a conservative man of the cloth. Yet the evening’s events show him to be a deeply questioning soul whose vocation was well-chosen. Younger daughter Jenny, played by Charlotte Hunter with perfect period poise, has her own dilemma, of love or duty, when her admirer, the dour Scot David, effortlessly caught by Tom Patterson, offers her an ultimatum.
Dean Smith is younger son Mick, evoking the period of Suez and Aden by appearing still in uniform, while Cousin Richard (the excellent film and t.v. stalwart Alan Leith) turns out to be a career soldier against his own principles or wishes. Duty again. But it’s the dashing Corrinne Wicks as career girl Margaret who chrystalises the play’s central dilemma – do traditional views of duty and morality have any place in the post-war world?
Add in a couple of omniscient aunties, Aunt Lydia (the elegant Hildegard Neil) who listens before she speaks and nightmare guest Aunt Bridget (the wonderfully comic Sally Saunders) and you have a cast which has the audience eating out of their hands.
A lovely heart-warming evening in the theatre, just right for those after-Christmas blues.
The Holly and The Ivy runs at the Lichfield Garrick until Saturday (January 18). For tickets phone the box office on 01543 4124121 or go online at www.lichfieldgarrick.com.
