Liveliest Theatre

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30830, 16 August 1965, Page 14

Liveliest Theatre

The Sunday Night Theatre Club continues to offer the most enterprising, the liveliest and the most stimulating theatre in town. Last night the club presented William Gibson’s sentimental sermon on the text, shortened for the occasion, love makes the world go: the playwright is not, however, particularly successful in suggesting where. For all its gimmicks, its lapses from good taste, and its oscillation between rather pretentious symbolism and unpretentious farce. “Dinnv and the Witches” is always funny and provocative. Chris Williams’s production was wide awake to all the theatrical possibilities of the script and enabled a young cast to bewitch, bewilder and bemuse the appreciative audience. They could not but be entertained. Helen Kotlowski, CherylAnne Kingston and Helen Burns teamed well as the witches. Imagine the three stooges playing the witches in a Greek “Macbeth." Imagine them furiously spinning, teasing and cutting off human life. One eludes them—a trumpeter, Dinny. Dinny's music is powerful enough to stop eternal time, and give him the power to control the world.

Dinny (Stephan O'Rourke)

tries to use his power to help his fellow man, to heal the blind, to redistribute wealth—but everything turns as sour as it has always done. It appears that, because of original sin, inefficiency or human nature, man is incapable of making life work. Only when Dinny forsakes his search for perfection does he find the saving love \that was always right under his nose. A very happy ending? The audience is chased out of the theatre with the reminder that the eternal time clock has recommenced its count-down: and each tick of its clock is one heartbeat less for each one of them. A chastening thought. Stephen O’Rouke was sometimes even more negative than his character needed, but most of the time attracted with his easy charm and credible sincerity. Judie Whitley was a perky, confident and versatile femme—necessarily —fatale.

It is a great pity that a production so richly developed as this should have only one performance, for this kind of theatre surely has the vitality to attract and captivate large and new audiences. Let the light be brought out from under the Sunday night bushel and put in the window of box-office box offices.— P.R.S. *