Quality Street at Richmond Theatre

Quality Street just had so much going for it; it was written by JM Barrie, it was produced by Northern Broadsides, it was on at Richmond Theatre and it had a box of chocolates named after it.

To elaborate a little. JM Barrie is most famous for Peter Pan but he also wrote the plays Mary Rose and Dear Brutus which I had seen and loved. I had also seen some other Northern Broadsides productions and had loved those too.

All that meant that it was an easy decision to book my usual seat, Dress Circle A25, for a fair £31.

At its heart, Quality Street, is a will-they, won't they love story set in Napoleon England. And as with all such stories, it is the missed opportunities and misunderstandings blocking the apparent path of true love that create the drama.

There was a particularly unusual aspect to one of these misunderstandings that gave the story a nice twist.

Another nice part of the story was the use of a current day Quality Street chocolates production team to frame the story. It also helped to explain the connection between the chocolates and the play which might otherwise have been an unsatisfactory confusion.

There was plenty of humour in the story too including nosey neighbours and love struck young soldiers.

The cast of nine, some playing multiple parts, was superb at both the high drama and the humour.

Everything about Quality Street was what I hoped for and it was a thoroughly entertaining afternoon.

For Love or Money at Rose Theatre

This is another one that I almost at Rose Theatre because of their bad publicity. I was in the theatre cafe for something else when I saw a pile of leaflets for the show and I recognised Barrie Rutter immediately. I had seen a few Northern Broadsides' touring productions in recent years and that was enough to convince me to see another one. I went for my usual place, A32, and paid £30 to do so.

For Love or Money was an adaption of a French farce, Lesage’s Turcaret apparenty, which meant that I knew what to expect, something funny that would not be too demanding on the intellect. And it was just that.

The situation was a young woman living beyond here means and surviving on the generosity of one admirer, a dubious banker much older than her, while being fleeced by a younger man, a rascal at best, that she had fallen for. That man had a partner in rascality and there were a few other maids and such like.

Most of the humour, and there was a lot of it, came from the larger than life characters who behaved extravagantly and ridiculously. The situation got more interesting too as wives turned up, people pretended to be other people and illicit encounters were recalled.

I went to see For Love or Money for some simple good humoured entertainment and that is exactly what I got.

When We Are Married at Rose Theatre was modestly funny

Somehow I found myself seeing three J B Priestly plays in short succession and as an experience this one fell somewhere in the middle of the three.

There was no compelling reason for me to see this but it was at my local theatre, Rose Theatre, it was by J B Priestly and it was presented by Northern Broadsides. That was enough for me to fork out £26 for Seat A43.

The stage was set fairly simply as the lounge in a reasonable house in 1930's Yorkshire. There three couples were celebrating their shared 25th wedding anniversaries when they receive the news that they were not properly married.

This caused a lot of consternation, not being married was called "living in sin" then, and also forced each couple to consider if, now they were single, they would marry the partners they thought that they were married to.

There were some strong stereotypes in the group, such as one henpecked husband and one really boring one, and these were joined by a surly housemaid and a drunk photographer. These characters, rather than any plot, were  the root of much of the play's humour. This made the humour a little simplistic at times but it was funny none the less. Just not as funny as The Roundabout had been a month earlier.

When We Are Married was pleasant enough, and easily worth the price of the ticket and a night away from other things, it was somewhat dated (that was reflected in the average age of the audience, why would any young person want to see a play like this?) and somewhat simple.