STAGE REVIEW: Lady Anna: All At Sea - at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Tuesday, September 27 to Saturday, October 1, 2016.

THIS is part fact, part fiction, and the blend is quite an intriguing and entertaining concoction.

The rich mix is all down to playwright Craig Baxter, a considerable fan of the esteemed and energetic author Anthony Trollope, who was such a prolific wordsmith during his working life.

What Baxter has done is to utilise one of Trollope’s better known works and stir in the fresh idea of it being acted out while the novelist and his wife are travelling on board the SS Great Britain to Australia in the 1870s - hence the somewhat unconventional title.

But it’s exactly what it says on the tin and once it was popped open the juxtaposition of fact - Trollope’s real life and the lengthy, almost epic journey Down Under, with the fiction of his novel’s heroine and her struggles to thwart convention and class divides ensured it was always engaging and at times quite witty.

With a mere seven-strong cast they have to play other roles and their versatility has clearly been honed on the road during this production’s tour round the country.

Books bound in white covers litter the stage and hang from wires on Libby Watson’s simple and stark set.

No matter, we are after all stirring in two stories and this simplicity, married to Baxter’s descriptions and limited sound effects, take us effortlessly from a country pile, down into the wide open Yorkshire Dales and back up again to the austere atmosphere of a court of law.

Rhiannon Handy’s Anna is quite entrancing as she is forced to decide where her affections lie - a titled earl (Adam Scott-Rowley), so stylishly played he could have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, or maybe she will stick with a poorish tailor. Meanwhile Jonathan Keeble’s Trollope is in all essence a performance of quality and they all thrive off each other.

It’s a relatively short play and could easily have been over-complicated if not a touch dull but with clashes over a legacy, love, class and concerns over clergy and courtrooms, that is one accusation which would be well wide of the mark.

And after all, it is two stories for one! Now that is value for money…