Old Ladies (tour)

The Old Ladies is a real theatrical oddity. It was written and produced in the West End some seventy years ago by Rodney Ackland, and based on an even earlier story by novelist Hugh Walpole. It could be dismissed as an arthritic old chestnut, unworthy of revival, but there is something disturbingly dark about the piece which stays with the audience long after the curtain has fallen.

Hyped as a psychological thriller, in reality the play is about ageing, loneliness, and madness. What could have lured three of our foremost female acting institutions to venture out in a tour of this creaky old hokum?

Well, for a start the dramatist has provided three really juicy parts for thesps of a certain age, no matter how preposterous the characters, and the plotting. And Rosemary Leach, Angela Thorne, and Sian Phillips play them for all they are worth.

Set in designer, Norman Coates’s grim and gloomy two tiered old house, located in an anonymous Cathedral town at the beginning of the last century, three elderly women, on their uppers, occupy cluttered and shabby bed-sits. Lucy Amorest (Leach) is the level-headed one, caring and generous with what little she has, and welcoming May Beringer (Thorne) to the small community. May, on the hand is nervous, twittery and afraid of her own shadow. Upstairs in her lair is Agatha (Phillips), a mad, bad, and, (as it turns out) dangerous to know, old crone.

Agatha, shamelessly chewing the scenery, covets May’s cherished amber stone, and progressively drives her into a maelstrom of mental and physical affliction, (although sensitive May’s ultimate demise rather reminds one of Spike Milligan’s famous gravestone epitaph, ‘I told you I was ill’). Nevertheless, despite this patent bunkum, Phillips, bewigged as a sort of Captain Hook-alike, clearly enjoys every minute of this nonsense while Thorne is by and large convincing as her vulnerable bete noir. Leach, as the least outlandish component of this bitter soufflé, issues forth, Miss Marple-like, with tea and sympathy, in her sensible shoes.

Frith Banbury, now in his ninety-second year, directs this confection with some aplomb. Indeed he apparently directed a previous revival of The Old Ladies fifty years ago, and knew the author. He therefore avoids the pitfall, recurrent in this sort of contrived and dated melodrama, of the paying customers laughing at the actors, rather than with the characters. He colours in as menacing an atmosphere as he can, given the endless chatter and the rambling, not to say ambling, progress of the storyline.

Its easy to make fun of this type of entertainment, yet I am reluctant to write it off because there is a genuine feeling of underlying peril and disorientation here, and frankly, it is worth the price of admission merely to see three estimable actresses on one stage at the same time.

– Stephen Gilchrist (reviewed at Richmond Theatre)