Miss Popplewell at Eastbourne
Having missed the Rude Mechanicals at Alexandra Park last month, our drama critic CHRIS VICARY caught the performance at Eastbourne
The Rude Mechanical Theatre Company are a local company best known for their outdoor tours and for taking theatre into small rural communities. Their performance style is based on the traditional Commedia dell’arte, adapted to reflect British archetypes.
Their most recent production, Miss Popplewell’s Garden, which has just completed its tour with performances in a circus tent in Eastbourne, is set in 1940’s rural Sussex with echoes of early wartime, particularly the evacuation of children to the countryside. It is a tragi-comic tale of love found and love lost, of misunderstanding, and fear of the unknown. At first we assume strawberries have been ‘scrumped’ by a trio of naughty schoolgirls from the house of the eponymous Miss Popplewell, who keeps herself to herself and is rumoured to be a witch, but soon there is evidence of further trespass.
The cast of six multi-talented performers– actors, singers and musicians – in traditional clown make-up introduce us to the residents of Little Inkling and the Willows School for Girls as they react to the growing hysteria regarding the interlopers into Miss Popplewell’s garden. One of the conceits of Commedia dell’arte is comic repetition. This works particularly well as the imagined threat escalates from scrumpers to mysterious outsiders, escaped convicts and murderers! Some of the repetition in the first half didn’t work as well as it might, and could have done with some judicious trimming. Parts of the script discussing the identity of the interloper came over as unnecessary stereotyping, and there were examples of what felt like twenty-first century slang, which I assume came from the improvisation.
In the second half we learn the truth about the trespass and the reason for Miss Popplewell’s reclusive nature, and we get some more complex performances particularly from Gregor Duncan as the outsider and Holly Cassidy as Miss Popplewell, which added a poignancy to an otherwise overly jolly production. The performance was well received by a loyal audience, many of whom seem to have seen this company’s productions before. Touring companies are the lifeblood of England’s theatre and do need your continued support.
More details can be found on the company’s website therudemechanicaltheatre.co.uk. Look out for future productions.
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