Kindly Leave The Stage

Kindly Leave the Stage is new to me but with its set of stock characters I feel like I’ve seen it a hundred times. This English farce written by John Chapman, who has a heap of credits in the genre - Not Now, Darling, There Goes the Bride, and TV’s Are You Being Served - has devised a play-within-a-play piece about actors on a provincial tour who let their private lives surface in full-view of the audience. The fourth wall is not only broken but blitzed.

With an aging alcoholic thespian prone to forgetting lines, it does bear some relation to Michael Frayn’s classic Noises Off but is not nearly as funny.

It opens in the middle of a dinner party hosted by Sarah and Rupert who have had a blazing row in front of their guests, married couple Charles and Madge. Midway through a tirade at Sarah, Rupert forgets his lines and has a major meltdown, breaks from the script, and accuses the actor playing Charles of having an affair with Madge, his wife in real life. When she admits it and confesses they’re in love, things get out of control and even more complicated with the arrival of Sarah’s mother Mrs C, her fond-of-a-tipple father Edward, a nurse and the harassed stage manager Angela.

Chaos ensues as we move between the play and real life with Edward spouting a Shakespeare soliloquy at the drop of a hat and dreaming of his glory days playing Lear.

Director Chris Guyler has assembled a good cast who work valiantly to keep this piece airborne. Nathaniel Young as the cuckolded husband Rupert carries the play with lively bursts of righteous indignation, disbelief, and threats of murder. Lesley Davis gives a whip-smart performance of the adulteress Madge, whilst Jason Lawson plays the besotted lover like a lovesick teenager.

Best however was Richard Williams as the gin-sozzled Edward. His entrances as he got progressively drunker were a delight. Dierdre Robinson’s Mrs C was fun, especially when she dropped her ‘stage’ accent and became broad North Country, Melanie Pennisi pouted and screamed with vigour, whilst Joanne Oliver and Belinda McCulloch as the nurse and stage manager also got laughs.

It’s not the best farce in the world, nor the funniest, but top marks to Guyler and his cast who made us think it was a gem.

Peter Pinne             

Photographer - Kaymar Kreations