Review: It’s a Wonderful Life - at The Festival Theatre, Malvern, Wednesday/Thursday, June 9/10, 2015.

THIS is unashamedly a tribute to the universally well-known film version starring James Stewart in the central role of George Bailey but Oliver Stoney, although tall, dark and handsome enough, left it until the very last scene of the play to catch the innocence and wonderment of Stewart’s original interpretation.

Director Guy Retallack’s production from the Bridge House Company got off to a positive start with this Malvern premiere.

Here the staging of the Tony Palermo play was transferred to a radio station where it was acted out in front of the audience who became part of the performance itself, dutifully clapping manically on cue led by the prompting of the Sound Effects Engineer, who sadly failed even to get a programme credit.

This is a shame for this central device straightaway brought the audience onside and created a fund of goodwill; the audience, involved from the start, wanted the play to succeed.

The central theme of the play was explored well enough. George Bailey is a dreamer, who by force of circumstance never achieves his ambition to travel and live a life of heroic activity. He feels himself to be a loser; the only way of saving the family finances being to end his miserable existence by jumping off the bridge over his home town’s main river.

Enter the diffident Clarence Oddbody, ‘Angel, Second Class’, marvellously played by Richard Albrecht, who quite literally brings George to his senses by demonstrating how much more worse off the world would have been without the good that he had already unwittingly achieved many times over.

The rest of the cast made good work out of their multi-role playing, especially effervescent Benjamin Chamberlain who effortlessly switched from one character to another quite literally at the swap of a hat.

I just can’t help feeling that the production missed out on a number of comic opportunities here; the sound effects are done well enough in full view of the audience, but why, if they are never brought in to serve as part of the action? Indeed, the rest of the cast never reacted to them or anticipated the effect they might create.

Likewise a number of tricks were missed through the use, or the mis-use, of the radio microphones. From time to time the cast, quite rightly at crucial points in the story, began to act out the play for real, quite forgetting for the moment that they were supposed to be portraying a radio performance. At these points they moved in and out of the range of the microphones without any effect on the volume coming across the footlights.

There’s a potential for some real fun here.

However, on balance, the company has created a most enjoyable evening out. It asks the question of the audience - ‘Have you made the world a better place by your being in it?’ By giving us such a heart-warming live reminder of this timeless classic, it answered the question for itself.

I, for one, would have been worse off without experiencing the energy and sense of fun that pervades their performance.

BB