Still worth a peep round the net curtains

IT has been nearly 30 years since Talking Heads first aired on television. Since then, Alan Bennett's finely crafted monologues have been a staple of the provincial theatre canon.

A dark undercurrent weaves through each of his tales of little lives writ large and they continue to resonate with audiences as much as they did in the 1980s. It is a world of petty prejudices and trendy vicars, bay windows and net curtains, of court shoes and suede coats and phrases such as 'tip top' and 'press on'.

This week a trio of these powerfully emotional stories continue to show their worth, each framed by a series of starkly dressed sets.

In many respects it is Stephanie Cole who has the hardest job; the hardest act to follow. She has the not-so-enviable task of playing elderly widow Doris in A Cream Cracker Under the Settee, the role that is synonymous with the late Thora Hird.

Cole - who was the star of the original Talking Heads' Soldiering On - is a worthy successor; shuffling about the stage on her backside with an ease that her character's predicament will not allow, dispensing laughter and tears as she reminisces on married life with the hapless Wilfred.

In A Chip In the Sugar Karl Theobald (The Green Wing and 2012) entirely inhabits Graham Whittaker, the sexually ambivalent, stay-at-home bachelor, whose former mental health issues return to haunt him when a face from the past comes courting his mother.

If there is a weak link in the production it is Siobhan Redmond (The High Life and Holby City) as Irene Ruddock in A Lady of Letters. With an oddly shrill voice she is not entirely convincing as the spinster busybody who ruins lives with thrusts of her 'trusty Platignum' fountain pen.

Only when she is behind bars and discovers the freedom that was denied by her lonely, buttoned-up existence, does she truly shine in the role.

David Chapman