'While The Sun Shines' at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond

Terence Rattigan's war-time comedy of manners, 'While The Sun Shines' is on at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, cue problems with the District Line while we're trying to get out to Richmond. It always seems to happen when we visit the Orange Tree. I've seen quite a few Rattigan plays in the last decade or so and, while they're very old fashioned and often dated, I quite like them so this was a good opportunity to add another one to my list of his plays I've seen.

It's the tale of Bobby, a young sailor in the Second World War who's managed to get leave so he can marry his fiancé. Remember, of course, that this is Rattigan so Bobby isn't just any old sailor, he's an earl, the Earl of Harpenden to be precise, worth two million pounds and with three country estates.

Bobby's going to marry Lady Elizabeth who's come down from her WAF posting in Scotland. Bobby has rescued a drunken American soldier, Joe, from the street and offers him his plush apartment for his stay in London and arranges for him to hook up with a lady of Bobby's acquaintance, Mabel Crum. Lady Elizabeth turns up unexpectedly and Joe mistakes her for Mabel which makes Elizabeth wonder whether she's ready for marriage. All sorts of wrangles and mistakes follow which stretches out the day into the small hours of the wedding day, but what on earth can happen?

It's great fun and got laughs in all the right places from the largely older audience who easily got the jokes about spam (people told jokes about spam well before Monty Python). The play is set entirely in Bobby's apartment where everyone seems to end up, including Elizabeth's father (a duke and a general), a French lieutenant who fell for Elizabeth on the train journey form Scotland and, of course, the wonderful Mabel Crum.

Mabel is the best character in the play and gets most of the best lines. She's a secretary at the war ministry but is also man-hungry and delights in going out and enjoying herself, and that is how she's known Bobby for ages. She calls herself a trollop but in the best possible way. She has a heart of gold and a very modern view of love and relationships. She also has her own morals. Everyone should have a best friend in a Mabel Crum for some straight talking over a drink or two. Dorothea Myer-Bennett had the good fortune to be cast in the role and she milked it for all it was worth. Well done!

I must also give Michael Lumsden a mention since as soon as he came on I recognised him without knowing quite who he was. I've seen him at the Orange Tree before but it's his voice I recognised - he plays Alistair in 'The Archers'! That's how I knew the voice especially since he's been having a more high profile time in the series recently. He's got pompous old ass down to perfection in this play who gets deliciously conned by the clever Mabel at the end. Serves you right! I also quite liked Philip Labey as Bobby and John Hudson as Bobby's manservant.

Sadly, I left it late in the run to get tickets and the play ends tomorrow so I can't see it again. I think there are still a few tickets left for Saturday so if you haven't seen it and you fancy a laugh in Richmond, head on down to the Orange Tree.

'French Without Tears' at the Orange Tree Theatre

We went on another visit to the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond to see the penultimate performance of 'French Without Tears' by Terence Rattigan. How fitting that this tale of upper-middle class young men should be in upper-middle class Richmond. I've seen a few Rattigan plays over the years and they're all of their time, generally including lots of posh people, but the only one I actually liked was his tale of airmen in the Second World War in 'Flare Path' (with Sheridan Smith and Sienna Miller).

'French Without Tears' is one of his earlier plays and is set in a house on the French coast at which various posh young men are staying to learn French. As well as the middle aged teacher and his daughter (who also teaches), a young lady is staying with her brother because she has nowhere else to go since her talks are in India. The appropriately named Diana is a femme fatale and her prey in men. Two of the young men are learning French to help them pass the entrance exams for 'the Diplomatic', another is a rich young man with nothing better to do while another wants to learn French for 'commercial reasons'. They are soon joined by a new student in the form of a stiff upper lip naval commander. And the scene is set.

The constant bickering between the men in the first half makes most of them rather unpleasant characters and Alan who wants to join 'the Diplomatic' since his father is a diplomat is distinctly misogynistic with a definite downer on women and Diana in particular. Diana is a man-hunter, always needing a man to fall in love with her and as soon as she's achieved that then searches for a new man to make fall in love. It's her nature, as she says at one point. When the commander arrives she sets her sights on him and effortlessly wins him, much to the chagrin of Kit, who also loves her. The men start to fight and, during verbal sparring realise that Diana has said the same thing to each of them and realise that game's afoot. This aces them all bond as brothers to fight off the spells of Diana. It was only in the latter stages of this half that I started to see anything likeable in any of the male characters.

In the second half, Kit and the Commander win free so Diana sets her sights on Alan and effortlessly makes him fall for her. O dear, men are such fragile creatures. He also wins free and decides to chuck in becoming a diplomat and wants to go back to England to become a writer. In the meantime, Kit has decided that he really loves Jacqueline, the French teacher who has loved him for two months and the Commander, of course, has his love of the sea. And Diana? Well, there are always other men.

The characters are almost universally awful except for Jacqueline (played by Sarah Winter with a very good accent) who is sympathetic throughout and Brian (played for laughs by Tom Hanson), the bluff Englishman with the atrocious franglais accent and who likes the company of the local ladies of the night for 50 francs a pop. Tom had some of the best lines in the play and plays Brian as a jolly good sport, liked by all, not terribly bright but a good egg. The best line for me was when talking about Diana and how she turns the green light on men she likes then said she was 'pretty stingey with the orange and red ones' - that tickled my funny bone no end. Genevieve Gaunt was also fun (in a two dimensional way given her character) as Diana, never without a cigarette on the go and exposing flesh whenever possible.

The staging was nice but the costumes were awful, with hems frayed and seams not straight and all seemed a little too big for the people wearing them. O well, you can't have it all in small theatres. But, at least, once again, the Orange Tree has put on something a bit different that no-one else seems to want to play so it's worth it for that alone. I'll keep an eye out for Sarah Winter and Tom Hanson - it'll be interesting to see where they turn up next.

'Play Mas' at The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond

A few weeks ago we went to see the revival of a play from the 1970s by Mustapha Matura at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, 'Play Mas' about events before and after the liberation of Trinidad from Empire in the 1960s. Well, freedom from the British Empire to be swallowed by the American empire. Apparently this was it's first revival since the '70s which seems odd but its politics of big business and money are still as current today as they ever were.

It starts out in an Indian tailors' workroom with the tailor and the family servant bantering about making a suit and films, while the tailor's off-stage mother needs to borrow the servant lad for odd tasks. It takes a while to get going and gradually the political overtones start emerging of class and race and the ridiculousness of the one white character appearing all sweaty and exhausted from just walking from his car to the tailor's workroom. And then there's the political rally that the servant lad wants to go to but is forbidden by his employer and subsequently fired. That was a long scene that was pleasant enough but didn't seem to go anywhere until you make the connections in the penultimate scene.

Next we have the 'Mas' or 'masquerade' of the title, with various people visiting the tailors' workroom in costume and character as part of the Trinidad carnival. Firstly the servant lad returns in military fatigues and carrying a rifle threatening to kill the tailor and his mother, totally convincing until he broke out laughing, swigs some rum and leaves in high spirits. But that's too much for the tailors' mother and she dies off-stage of a heart attack. That makes the next few has characters even more surreal as it's never entirely clear who's playing who - the doctor, the priest, the undertakers. This was a throughly engaging and enjoyable part of the play and Victor Romero Evans was great as the witchy-doctor character, servant of the underworld wanting a few pennies.

The second half kicks off a few years later with the former servant now serving as the chief of police under the new regime with his social climbing wife, rich friends and new entrepreneurs trying to influence what happens and his wanting to ensure that America will invest in the newly safe and trouble-free nation that's being created. He tries to enlist the tailor to be a spy while telling him about being wined and dined in New York and going to see international films (films - or flims - keep cropping up). Mas is banned that year to ensure no civil disturbances but he's eventually persuaded to reinstate it and give an amnesty to the anti-American groups so that can join in. At his Mas party in his office over-looking the city square all his rich friends come dressed to the nines as the army takes on the rebel groups celebrating and his plan comes together as the lights go down.

It was such an odd ending that it wasn't immediately clear that is was the end and then the clapping started. Seun Shote was excellent as the servant/police chief moving quite easily from the shambling servant lad in cut-off trousers to the be-suited police chief. I also liked Victor Romero-Evans as the indebted spiv, the witchy-doctor and the thrusting entrepreneur in the final scenes. It was well produced on the tiny stage, made even smaller by the audience members in the front rows sitting with their legs stuck out.

So that's two trips to the Orange Tree in the first months of 2015. That suggests there may well be more during the year if the quality of works stays at this high standard.

'Widowers' Houses' at The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond

Last week Chris took me to see a George Bernard Shaw play I've never heard of (one of many I've never heard of) at the Orange Tree Theatre in deepest, darkest Richmond upon Thames. I've not only not heard of the play, I've not heard of the theatre either and that was part of the impetus for going - a rarely performed play in a theatre neither of us had been to before. So ok, let's go.

The theatre is only a few minutes from the station on the main road and it's partially painted orange so you can't really miss it. It's been there for donkeys years and seems to have been recently renovated but there's an awful lot of steps to get anywhere in the building. It also prides itself in putting on rarely performed plays, hence Mr Shaw. This play is from 1892 so relatively early in the Shaw cannon and it reeks of the late Victorian-ness that I always have a problem with.

The play opens with two English gentlemen on a tour down the Rhine, one of whom falls for a young heiress travelling with her father while the other gentleman is an unspeakable prig and snob and, for all that, great fun (in a kind of poking fun at and laughing at rather than with, if you see what I mean). They agree to marry and the father agrees subject to his beloved daughter being accepted by the posh gent's titled relatives. Only when they get back to London do they find out that the father's vast fortune that he'll settle on his daughter is based on being a slum landlord (he's the widower in the title). The righteous gentleman, who is a doctor and sees folks from the slums every day, can't accept this and takes it even worse when he finds out that his entire income is raised from the slum landlord's mortgage on the property that has been in his family for a long time.

The second half gets even murkier when it seems there's a new scam in London town as the municipal councils seek to build new roads and spruce the place up a bit by getting rid of the slums. The scam is to do up the slums and then claim huge compensation when they're pulled down. Will the good doctor resist this temptation? will he win back his love? will he ever hold his head high again? That's for me to know and for you to guess.

After my initial 'o no, what have I let myself in for' worries, I actually started to enjoy the play. It's performed in the round and I was sitting at the end of the row so I often had actors coming up behind me and starting to act as they approached the stage which made me jump a few times (particularly when the waiter rang a huge bell behind me to announce dinner) but it was good fun, a bit wordy in places but fun nonetheless. The only thing that drew attention away from the play were the oddly Dickensian poses of Simon Gregor as Lickcheese which were a bit over the top.

Stefan Adegbola was great fun as the camp snob Cokane who is only concerned with how things look and our young lovers were both good value with Alex Waldmann as Doctor Trench and Rebecca Collingwood as Blanche, the particularly violent and demure young lady. It was nice to see Rebecca in her first professional play since I saw her in the final year student's performance at the Guildhall last year when she played Flaemmchen in 'Grand Hotel'. I noted in that blog that she had the best voice on stage and, although this was a non-singing role, it was still nice to see her (and I went up to her afterwards to say 'well done').

The play is sold out for the rest of its run but I'm pleased I've seen it and visited the theatre. I suspect we'll be returning!