Perfect performances as excellent new play from Scarborough playwright Shari Gledhill brought to local stage
Shocks, secrets, lies, twists and turns were the order of the play One of Us by Scarborough playwright Shari Gledhill.
The award-winning dramatist’s company Bananadrama presented the full-length drama at Burniston and Cloughton Village Hall.
The plot – three sisters meeting for the funeral of their mother, where long-buried resentments and secrets surface like a vampire hungry for fresh blood – could have been ripped from the pages of an EastEnders script.
Remember Zoe Slater screaming at her ‘sister’ Kat: “You ain’t my mother”? The play had that kind of vibe.
The proceedings got darker as more secrets were revealed and the sisters – the ‘witches of Burniston’ – showed what lengths they were prepared to go to protect each other.
The cosy, chintzy, comfortable sofa setting of respectable suburbia made the unfolding events ever more disturbing.
It is a play for women entering their middle years Gledhill’s piece puts these under-represented women and their lives centre stage. It is not a feminist rant or rage against misogyny – though the words which best describe the sole bloke in it cannot be used in a family newspaper.
On the contrary, Penny, Angela, Emma and Susan are all fully-rounded, interesting individuals ploughing their own furrow.
Kate Woodward-Hay played Penny, the oldest, wisest and kindest of the sisters; Bette Davis positively ignited the stage as the free-spirited, flighty Angela, Lisa Ponter was the model of the spoiled, indulged and yet downtrodden youngest Emma and Rachel Emerson played the sensible ‘outsider’ who puts her foot in it with spectacular results.
By the final curtain, the four women had learned about themselves and been changed – for the better – by circumstances, extreme as they were. Chris Parrinder made Griff, Emma’s bullying boyfriend, as three-dimensional as the female protagonists.
Guest director Duncan Lewis kept a tight rein on the five-strong company, allowing the emotions to build inexorably to fever pitch before murder threw the audience into a melodramatic meltdown.
Sue Wilkinson