Confusions - High Street Players

Confusions

Harpenden High Street Players

Katherine Warrington School

Sunday 11th July 2021

I did something very strange and unusual yesterday. Don’t get excited, I didn’t rob a bank or go skinny dipping. Far too old for both. No, the strange thing I did was to go to a theatre, sit with other people, and watch actors on a stage performing a play. In the modern, zoom infested, world it is the first time I have done that for nearly eighteen months. Okay it wasn’t really a theatre, only a school hall, and the actors were from my own small company but it was a start at getting back to some sort of normality. Hands were sanitised, faces were masked, and chairs socially distanced, so it wasn’t pre pandemic days at the National but it lifted my spirits. In a barren world the smallest gifts are precious.

I have always, in the past, studiously avoided reviewing a company I am associated with. I do have standards you know, albeit pretty low ones. Beside there are no brownie points in it. Any praise seems sycophantic and any criticism might get your tea laced at the next social get together. And, perish the thought, if on stage with some actor you slagged off in his or her last production you may get more than lines thrown in your direction. But strange times lead to strange decisions and having no involvement in any capacity with Confusions I skirted the boring tennis, popped along to see it and decided to give it a blog. It was either that or skinny dipping.

Alan Ayckbourn’s Confusions is a series of loosely linked playlets from his early days which, pleasingly, have never dated. All beautifully illustrate both the sad and comic aspects of the human condition. And no one does that better than Ayckbourn. Mother Figure depicts a lonely and disturbed Lucy treating her neighbours as children, Between Mouthfuls has two warring couples linked audibly by their hovering waitress (a splendid Margaret Cox) and the manically comic Gosforth’s Fete has mayhem in abundance both on and offstage. Lewis Cox gave a first class bravura performance as the dominating Gosforth but all in this little gem of a play gave solid performances. The production was rounded off with the gentle and perceptive A Talk in the Park when communication, or the lack of it, underlined the sadness of many lives. Kirstene Henriksen, impressive in all her roles, particularly scored as the neurotic women convinced that all police women are really men in drag. Laughing through masks isn’t easy but I managed that one.

All in all a pretty good couple of hours. A bit more pace and projection in the early plays, coupled with some music to fill the necessary long scene changes, would have enhanced some proceedings but given that the most complex, Gosforth’s Fete, zinged, then Margaret Cox edges the directorial stakes over the admirable Mike Lees. And in this one the light and sound boys served up a highly realistic storm. I know, because I am an expert on storms and stage ones often fail to convince. Six actors played eighteen roles between them in the four plays with rarely a serious slip. Daisy Hollingsworth (an amusingly ingenuous Milly impregnated by Gosforth), Richard Pike and David Cox completed the pleasing sextet.

So, hopefully, no obvious sycophancy and, even more hopefully, no poisonously laced tea at our next theatrical get together. Besides, if we are all still wearing masks perhaps they won’t recognise me. I knew this pandemic had compensations.

Roy Hall