Reviewed by Frank McKone
March 20
Cast
Andrea Close: Amelia Slater; Sarah Hartley: Victoria Slater (20-21 March)
Aleksis Andreitchenko: Victoria Slater (27-28 March)
Richard Manning: Henry Slater
Helen McFarlane: Elizabeth Jordan; Timmy Sekuless: Ben Jordan
Graeme Rhodes: Host and Abel Merryweather
Production Team
Playwright: Stanley Houghton
Adapted by Bart Meehan and Lexi Sekuless
Director: Lexi Sekuless
Stage Manager: Ciara Ford
Mill Theatre shows itself in a new light – light entertainment in a Live Radio Play, saying This production revives the tradition from the 1930s to the 1950s, inviting you to watch the mechanics of storytelling in real time: actors at microphones, sound effects created live, music underscoring the action — and a brand-new recording captured every night. It’s theatre, radio, and time travel all at once.
But I have some doubts, not about the performances but about the purpose of choosing this playscript and what might have been done to make this clear to the audience.
William Stanley Houghton (1881–1913) was an English playwright who wrote the original play for the stage in 1908. The Dear Departed was amusing in its day, and remained popular, being adapted to fit within the history of BBC Radio Theatre's exploration of social issues and comedy, and broadcast on a number of occasions, in different adaptations, through the 1970s.
But in this local Canberra adaptation by ANU’s Bart Meehan and Lexi Sekuless, playing the Slater and Jordan families as old-fashioned English toffs, for we colonials to denigrate, actually loses part of the point of the play that Houghton wrote.
He was writing in parallel to the more famous (and much more substantial playwright) George Bernard Shaw who had recently written How He Lied to Her Husband and Major Barbara in 1905. Houghton, like Shaw, was keen on presenting ordinary – i.e. working class – people while raising difficult issues, like family inheritance, in The Dear Departed.
The UK Wimbourne Drama Club, for their recent stage production, have pointed out that Houghton was a leading figure of the Manchester School of dramatists, but have published an un-named reviewer saying “Apparently rewritten to make it adaptable to any locale, Stanley Houghton’s well-known comedy, ‘The Dear Departed’, retained all the humorous situations but the dialogue – from the North Country idiom, and dialect – lost much of its impact.”
https://wimbornedramaproductions.com/productions/past/the-dear-departed/
Though I could easily laugh along last night, making fun of the English upper class made for too easily predictable jokes – including how obvious it was that Grandpa would rise from the ‘dead’ – while I can imagine doing it in Beatles’ accents (although they were from Liverpool, not Manchester), and emphasising the awfulness of the daughters’ attitudes towards their struggling working class drunkard father. Then the laughter has a black edge which applies to us all.
I rather like to think that Shaw saw The Dear Departed, and then wrote Pygmalion (1913) - which, of course, then was made lighter (but still funny) as a musical in My Fair Lady.
So Mill Theatre has done the good thing by going a bit off the beaten track, but I think the entertainment might have been a bit less light.
As I said, though, the performances were excellent, with changing voice modes and noises off all cleverly done. I once saw a video of The Goon Show being live broadcast, with Peter Sellers making it even funnier for his acting colleagues in the studio, as well as for the listeners.
The Dear Departed – Live Radio Play works very well, and you should focus especially on the Radio Presenter Graeme Rhodes, and his amazing transition into Abel Merryweather.
Highly recommended.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
