Honestly! Five minutes before curtains up and they’ve only gone and lost crucial canine cast-member, Winston, again.
In reaching for the stars (or a review rating of 1* at least) Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society throw off, yet again, the shackles of contemporary stagecraft orthodoxy and badly go where no ham-dram company has been before. Or should ever endeavour. The clue is in the title. Their ambitions are Titanic – with similar outcomes. Their impotence of being earnest sees this never ending national tour yet again holding them hostages to their own misfortunes.
With internal organ damage warnings issued, side-splitting, pant-compromising howlers anticipated aplenty, the show must go on, and it does relentlessly – on and on and on. Michael Green’s The Art Of Course Acting defines its cast as ones whom, ‘Can remember the pauses but not the lines.’ CPDS’s opus, Murder At Haversham Manor, is exactly what it says on the tin – excruciating murder indeed.
And the family name, Haversham? She went up in flames in Great Expectations. Clue there!
Be wary tonight, any expectations will grate exceedingly. Thus opens this delightfully contrived artifice from the teasingly wicked pens of Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields. A play within a play set in the country during the genteel inter-bellum years when Agatha Christie was in her prime. She remains alone in that regard. The audience is invited to suspend reality and quite possibly themselves from a rope. They are more inclined to ask, ‘Why do it?’ Rather than, ‘Who dunnit?’ Did not this dramatic company produce an alt.Chekovian micro-budget production of ‘Two Sisters’? Their radical take on C.S. Lewis’s The Lion & The Wardrobe left both audiences and critics speechless as did the austerity inspired musical CAT.
