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Date Posted: 16:19:41 07/04/09 Sat
Author: Not Supplied
Subject: Present Laughter

I attended Present Laughter this week and have to say the heat in the auditorium made it a real ordeal. It would have to take a very good performance indeed to compensate for being oven roasted and this didn’t quite do the job. I am not quite sure why. It was nicely directed with a very good set indeed and a real depth to the stage which you don’t often see at Bingley. The cast was uniformly solid. Deborah Mouat put in a nice turn as the snappy, officious Monica. It is nice to see a few actors given the chance to play different characters and not just turn out the same performances all the time – which does happen quite a lot at Bingley (and admittedly in the professional world too). Anna Clarke captured our attention with a nice cheeky, prim and proper performance although I’m not sure how much this sort of part stretches her as an actor. Jenny Dulson was nicely dour as Miss Erikson although a little too lifeless! I found the other younger female roles somewhat lack-lustre and they failed to really sparkle or capture the attention at all. Sharon Wallace was inaudible at the start of the play and then proceeded to go through a range of accents – posh, Yorkshire, Scottish – there was even a touch of Cilla on one or two occasions. With the Noel Coward period style of delivery there is a risk of dialogue becoming just a touch wooden in its delivery at times and lacking in believability. Chris Bentley certainly went for it as the highly bizarre character of Roland – but his performance was too over the top even for this character and he came across as a cross between a Toad of Toad Hall and a Gestapo Officer! He gave me the creeps but I suppose that is the intended effect.
I am afraid that for all the energy and gusto in his performance as Gary Essendine, I do feel that Paul Chewins lacks the real charisma for this sort of part. On the face of it there is not that much to laugh at in the first half but it is the charisma of the lead actor that makes a difference here, and I really don’t find Paul remotely engaging enough to carry the performance. There was a lot of over-enunciating and arm waving, and a great deal of shouting in the frenetic climax of the second half, but this started to grate after a while. It was not a delicate or nuanced performance at all and I felt I had seen it all after his first few lines. This may sound harsh – I am sure he is a very nice bloke and has obviously had a great deal of experience but I simply don’t warm to him on stage. I found myself feeling similarly after watching My Fair Lady earlier this year, in which he gave more or less the same performance as in this play. Also physically he is not right for the part – not his fault but a dubious casting decision.
But then of course I hear the applause at the end and here people with many good comments in the bar and talk of a faultless cast and I begin to wonder if I am on a different planet or is there an Emperor’s New Clothes outbreak in Bingley. Or am I being too harsh on an amateur production?
I have seen some genuinely very good productions at Bingley. Indeed Paul Chewins showed some fine direction in the great production of Dead Funny last year. This production had a superficial polish which seemed to satisfy many but which ultimately lacked the depth to convince or entertain me.

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