December 4, 2008
I’ve been to St Peter’s Players’ productions before and they are usually top-drawer amateur productions. I don’t want to be unkind to the Players - really I don’t - as they are all volunteers and they work so hard, acting, set-changing, serving the tea during the interval. They never stop! I’m therefore going to assume that this year’s Christmas special is just a blip and that next year will see a return to form - and I will continue now with what was good about the production.
The acting: Richard Gledhill as the pantomime dame was as good as any professional actor I’ve seen. All of the Players did their very best here with truly awful material. You would search long and hard to find a worse script - I simply did not find it funny, and you can’t blame the Players for that, as they didn’t write it. However, I appreciate that adults should not be the judges of whether a pantomime hits the mark. The children should decide - and sadly there was a dearth of them this evening. Out of an audience of approximately 60 people, there were approximately eight children – two of them with me. One of the others left during the interval. On the way home I asked mine what they thought of it. One said he didn’t understand the jokes; the other said he didn’t understand the jokes or follow the storyline. That is how I felt. On top of that, whilst normal theatre show length, it dragged terribly and I spent a lot of time looking at my watch when I should have been enjoying myself.
Admittedly the second half was a bit better than the first; at precisely 9.20pm, my son informed me that it 'was all starting to come together, a bit’. Poor kid - he’d spent nearly two hours not having a clue what was going on. It doesn’t help when phrases like ‘noblesse oblige’ are tossed casually into the script; children are not interested in how clever the scriptwriter thinks he is – they just want it to be funny.
The majority of the audience were almost certainly the friends and family of the performers and they howled with laughter every time one of their own came on stage. I hope the Players can fill seats every night with their home fans - at this rate, it looks like they'll need to.
The acting: Richard Gledhill as the pantomime dame was as good as any professional actor I’ve seen. All of the Players did their very best here with truly awful material. You would search long and hard to find a worse script - I simply did not find it funny, and you can’t blame the Players for that, as they didn’t write it. However, I appreciate that adults should not be the judges of whether a pantomime hits the mark. The children should decide - and sadly there was a dearth of them this evening. Out of an audience of approximately 60 people, there were approximately eight children – two of them with me. One of the others left during the interval. On the way home I asked mine what they thought of it. One said he didn’t understand the jokes; the other said he didn’t understand the jokes or follow the storyline. That is how I felt. On top of that, whilst normal theatre show length, it dragged terribly and I spent a lot of time looking at my watch when I should have been enjoying myself.
Admittedly the second half was a bit better than the first; at precisely 9.20pm, my son informed me that it 'was all starting to come together, a bit’. Poor kid - he’d spent nearly two hours not having a clue what was going on. It doesn’t help when phrases like ‘noblesse oblige’ are tossed casually into the script; children are not interested in how clever the scriptwriter thinks he is – they just want it to be funny.
The majority of the audience were almost certainly the friends and family of the performers and they howled with laughter every time one of their own came on stage. I hope the Players can fill seats every night with their home fans - at this rate, it looks like they'll need to.