Directors Showcase
Tom’s A-Cold by David Egan (dir Lora Davies)
The Ruffian on the Stair by Joe Orton (dir Emma Faulkner)
At The Orange Tree Theatre 2nd – 19th June

This is the latest offering from the very established Orange Tree Directors course, which has over the course of several years, been a regular route for many now established theatre directors to cut their teeth and to learn their craft.

The first play in this double bill was directed by Lora Davies and was the supposed story about two sailors, lost on the wastes of the frozen Canadian north west passage. It was a hot evening and somehow the Orange Tree had been turned into that frozen waste land. It was cold indeed! Christopher Heyward (Thomas) and Luke Trebilcock (George) very expertly managed to breathe life into these two characters, Lora Davies had expertly directed them so that there was a question mark over whether one or even the pair of them were alive and the other been a ghost of an eaten partner. She also managed to use the stage space superbly considering the limitation of being lost on an open boat. My only criticism was that I found the play too long and that the authors kept revolving back to themes that he had already dealt with and could possible have ended the piece at the point where one kills the other. It is a desperate plight to be left abandoned, hungry and forgotten in a waste land and Lora Davies made excellent use of that plight to build tension in the piece and to explore the question what would you have done? What a fragile hold we have on the morality of the life that we live.

The second piece was by one of my favourite authors, Joe Orton. It is his first written radio play and is an excellent demonstration of the man’s genius. Like all his work it is a very dark and funny piece and again has been superbly directed by Emma Faulkner. She has managed to remember that the lines are funny because the lines are funny and all you have to do is to deliver the lines. All you have to do! What an understatement. The characters are all very dark and quite nasty in this story, not the sort of people that you would want to meet. Orton always maintained that all the words that the characters say are true, so treating the script as such makes for a very chilling scenario, which is exactly what Emma Faulkner has done. This is a rare chance to see a very excellent production of a very deeply funny play. Joyce was played by Emma Beattie, Mike by John Paul Connolly and Wilson by Carl Prekopp.

Reviewed by Evan Rule