Titfield Thunderbolt (tour)

Making a novel or short story into a play or a film is commonplace. Much rarer is the turning of a film screenplay into a stage script. But that’s exactly what Philip Goulding has done with T E B Clarke’s text for the Ealing Studios 1953 classic The Titfield Thunderbolt.

Dr Beeching had not yet swung his axe to fell the majority of Britain’s rural and branch railway lines, but the cack-handed Modernisation Plan was already under way. As the country struggled out of post-World War austerity towards the mythical sunlight of ‘You’ve Never had it So Good’, nostalgia was beginning to take hold. There’s nothing like an irrecoverable past for agitating the present, and the future.

The story concerns the attempts of a disparate group of country dwellers to save their local train service. Opposed to these are bureaucrats from the town hall and Whitehall and the country equivalent of a London wide-boy or spiv (“No train service? I’ll offer a bus alternative. Does it matter if there’s only one bus, and that’s hardly roadworthy?”).

What’s clever about Bob Carlton‘s production is that with a speaking cast of only five actors it manages to twirl the audience into its own zany world. Much of the credit has to go to Rodney Ford‘s brilliant toy-theatre set which creates its own momentum and an incredibly active production and stage management team led by Dave Godin, Andy Rouse and Laura Jacobs. The rounds of applause their efforts elicited are fully justified.

Steven Pinder, principally as the vicar Sam Weech, and Paul Leonard as Mr Valentine – the financial saviour of the railway, as well as its would-be nemesis Vernon Crump, are a sheer delight and Philip Reed measures up to them as Harry Crump and an assortment of travellers. Loveday Smith is the vicar’s niece, Joan, and a trade union official quite unlike any I have ever come across. The lady of the manor Edna Chesterford is a somewhat thankless part when set against the others, but Kate O’Mara does what can be done with her.

All in all, it’s a fun evening and a romp in a very old, very British stage tradition with some marvellous theatre effects. What more could you want? Perhaps only the film original.

– Anne Morley-Priestman