Review Community Theatre

Press, 14 July 1989, Page 4

Review Community Theatre

Festival of Community Theatre, organised by the New Zealand Theatre Federation at the Mill Theatre, July 11 to July 15 at 7.30 p.m. Reviewed by Lindsay Clark. Festival audiences are frequently kind, if only because most of them are, or have been, involved in productions themselves. Three nights into this festival the audience was true to tradition and although performance standards were not in general high, the community spirit generated would have been compensation enough for most present. The first hour of the evening was devoted to a - production from the Sumner Theatrical Group Youth Division. Their musical version of J. R. Tolkein’s “The Hobbit” adapted and directed by Kathy Lean, Liz Trow and Kevin Ahem called on a large and welldisciplined cast of. children who obviously enjoyed their work. The enchantment of the original story though remained as remote as the Misty Mountaions themselves, and the mix of young performers with the following plays rather unbalanced the evening as a whole.

“With An E” written by Barry Grant and directed by Max Sullivan for the Peripatetic Players was a two-hander

which could have been written to ilustrate La Rochefoucaud’s sophisticated maxim, “We - are never more easily deceived than when we believe outselves to be deceiving.” A smug and selfcongratulatory architect sets out to demonstrate the predictable inconsistency of his wife, according to “her context.” In the entfcit is, with fine justice, he who is the predictable dupe. The last play too offered abundant surprise and reversal. “Cowboy,” by Alan Trussell-Cullen, directed by Cathy Jaegar for the Halswell Drama Group, presented Western material in the wonderfully inappropriate setting of a polite drawing room. A man dressed as a cowboy arrives in response to an advertisement for an actor to play a film role. The reception accorded him by the two women who see themselves as director and romantic lead is a colourful blend of fantasy and freakish reality. The cast did well to cope with a flow of heady language, some devastating non sequiturs and abundant images to do with the illusory nature of realtiy, packaging, pretending, film itself. Familiar territory perhaps, but enlivened in this instance by revelations and absurdities ,to .produce a droll and engrossing