It’s summertime again in lovely Lichfield, and who are these smiling, slightly-suntanned summer-clad hordes milling about the streets with comfortable looks of anticipation on their faces? Why, Lichfield International Festival-goers of course, and they turned out in force for Edinburgh Award-winning show Withering Looks in a nearly-sold-out Garrick main house.
It’s a neat idea, a send up of professional northern-ness somewhat after the style of ITV’s immortal Brass with Timothy West, if you can remember that far back, focusing on the world-famous trio of Yorkshire-born writers Charlotte, Anne and Emily Bronte. Well, two of them, actually, Charlotte, played by Maggie Fox and Emily, played by Sue Riding (or it could have been the other way round – they ran out of programmes). Anne was represented by a small bonnet on a little stick – it was that sort of production. We’re not talking impressive sets and costumes here – in fact the whole shebang reminded me of the naive student in Educating Rita who when asked how she would get round the problems of staging Ibsen said: “Do it on the radio.”
Endearingly home-made, Withering Looks had no pretensions to being a lecture and was most emphatically no dull history lesson – the accent was all on comedy. Maggie Fox (or Sue Riding – see above) as Charlotte was a natural droll, her speciality looking moon-faced at the eccentricities of sister Emily whose predilection for moorland and bad weather repeatedly caused her to mispronounce the name of her favourite local landmark, Penistone Crags. (Do try this at home.)
If the invention was spread a little thin in the second half (perhaps not everyone’s entirely familiar with the 1939 Merle Oberon/Laurence Olivier film version of Wuthering Heights) it didn’t deter the laughter and good humour of an audience who went happily off home(or to a late-night concert) from the theatre just that little bit more relaxed and happy than when they came in.
