Lettice & Lovage
by Peter Shaffer

Lettice and Lovage, performed by Hertford College Drama Society at the Moser Theatre, is worth the search. This reviewer missed the first act as the doors open only onto the stage - don't be late! Thus with the regrettable inability to comment on the usual crowd-pleaser of a first scene, the three remaining characters pulled off a sympathetic if occasionally regrettable rendition of this Shaeffer classic. Lettice, played to warm batty melodramatic precision by Clare Finnegan (although one wonders if she has ever held a live cat before - the way she plucked at the stuffed prop), was in overly dramatic contrast to Lotte (Keren White) who didn't melt from her unenviable civil servant grey even when drunk on the medieval quaff and language of the evening. She needed to take a deep breath and slow down.

The piece as a whole suffered from a machine gun delivery with little sympathy or response between characters. Whether this is due to nerves or direction the run will tell - one imagines the actors will eventually relax into their roles. On the whole the actresses did a fairly convincing job of playing parts written for those much older, wiser and the worse for wear. Colm MacCrossen however played a thoroughly stultified and arrythmic lawyer; the naive bumpkin would be better replaced by a blase public defendant who becomes engrossed in the spinster's melodrama in spite of himself. He is sadly incapable of beating an imaginary drum, indeed so inept as to be forgiven by the scant preview audience. Sid Vicious figures incongruously in a puzzling basement flat of a set - someone behind scenes has been mixing metaphors and remains blithely oblivious to the setting of the text, despite some contemporaneous updates. For an evening of ever timely comment on the mere and the ugly, for the pithy but light-hearted denouncement of the public eye, and for its subtext of theatrical seduction and escape from an increasingly drab world; make your way through the gloom, the bar and the squash courts of Wadham College where the Preservation Trust, Charles the First, the Shell Building and the Marie Antoinette are twisted together in a tight and wholly plausible piece of theatre.

Laragh Gollogly - 8/2/00