REVIEW: Southern Baptist Sissies, Above The Stag ✭✭✭
There’s lots of gentle humour, gentle pathos, gentle social critique, and a gently uplifting ‘message’ to go away with at the end.
There’s lots of gentle humour, gentle pathos, gentle social critique, and a gently uplifting ‘message’ to go away with at the end.
One of the best elements of the evening was us, the audience, the British, still laughing at ourselves and appreciating the irony of the lies politicians speak and the truths people live. It made me feel strangely patriotic.
It hasn’t helped this production also that current West End farce mega-hit The Play That Goes Wrong visited this venue just a few weeks ago, underlining further how archaic this type of farce is.
At the interval and the end- especially at the end- the audience, which included a large element of young people, erupted with a spontaneous cheering, whooping enthusiasm- it was the perfect response to this enjoyable production.
This is a play that never feels the need to shout or become hysterical, yet brims with anger, passion and love, and tunes in with our own questioning of national identity.
It’s very pleasant, often amusing, and if it doesn’t plumb any depths in its conventional story of growing up.
Ellen McDougall’s Othello is a very solid production, with excellent performances and a number of intriguing original motifs. Whilst these did not all work for me, mileage will vary between audience members, and the production’s many strengths and the excellent venue means it is to be recommended.
The great, central achievement of this production is in the two-handed coup of Jeremy Legat and Ed MacArthur’s dazzling performance as duetting singer-actor-dancer pianists.