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Review: Travels With My Aunt - Observer (Sept 2003)
This aunt travelled well with BATS
INGENIOUS timing and organisation allowed the BATS production of Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt to run smoothly last week.
Opening night at St Augustine's Hall last Thursday saw three Henry Pullings and two Aunt Augustas splitting scenes and sharing speeches to achieve streamlined and utterly watchable continuity. Henry's retired life is as slow and steady as his working life at the bank had been, so much so that he even looks forward to the disrup-tion of his mother's funeral. There he meets Aunt Augusta - his mother's sister who he has not seen for years and who is outspoken in her dislike for his father. Henry's life is upturned by his live-ly and strong-minded Aunt. She manages to mould his current life into something more like hers while changing his perception of his past altogether. Getting stoned with a young American girl on the Orient Express is a scene substantially dif-ferent to life before Aunt Augusta, but there are bigger changes in store for Henry. Even when he gets duped into smuggling and is taken to jail, the excitement is not over.
He finds out Aunt Augusta is actually his mother.
Characters for this play have often been distributed between just a few actors'. The BATS production had a cast of nine, with many taking on several roles, and the two main characters split between five. Henry was split between Peter Gallagher, Peter Bradbury and Nick Bloomfield. I had some hesitation as to how this would work, but the switches and change-overs were seamless. Not only that, they all created the same air of confusion, wonder, pensiveness, or whatever it was Henry was feeling at the time, to the same degree. Danni Segal played several eccentrics including Wordsworth, Aunt Augusta's 'friend' for much of the story. His comic bungling created the most laughs throughout the evening, but the character came to a tragic end when Henry found him dead with wounds thought to be self-inflicted. Maureen Taylor and Trish Daly shared the role of Aunt Augusta. Flamed-haired Aunty was the dominant character in the play and Trish and Maureen gave performances to match.
The collection of accents in the play were made convincing. Sophie Bradbury topped the bill with her portrayal of Tooley, the young American on the Orient Express. Her twang was brilliant. Verena Bradbury and Marcia Linden got to play the fun characters. These ranged from a demanding Frau Schmidt to dancers at a party, tea-leaf readers, palmists and Italian tarts.
This was a lively production, directed by Peter Bradbury who himself admitted it was a challenge to stage, with complex lighting and sound, scene and character changes.
With the exception of a few bodged lines, opening night went without a hitch, with a challenging play very well executed.
- CW, Bexhill Observer, 3/10/03
Review reproduced by permission
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