THEATRE
QUALITY STREET
PITLOCHRY FESTIVAL THEATRE
Reviewed by Mark Brown
J.M. Barrie’s 1901 comedy Quality Street has been somewhat neglected in his homeland of Scotland. The Scottish Theatre Archive shows no professional production of the drama since 1953.
This is a strange state of affairs, as this four-act play is neatly constructed, often very funny and entirely open to modern observations on gender politics. That is certainly true of Liz Carruthers’s clever staging for Pitlochry Festival Theatre (PFT), which, while remaining within Barrie’s frame of Georgian England, is shot through with 21st-century wit and irony.
The drama is set, in 1805 and immediately after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, among the marriageable young ladies and “old maids” of a small English town. There, the eligible gentleman Valentine Brown unwittingly breaks the heart of the widely admired Miss Phoebe Throssel by announcing, not that he wants to marry her, but that he has enlisted for the war against Napoleon.
What begins as a demure romance comedy, soon becomes a thoroughgoing farce. Valentine returns from the war entirely unaware that his financial advice of a decade before was so dreadful that it has forced Phoebe and her sister Susan to turn their house into a “school for genteel children”.
Valentine’s ungallant observations of Phoebe as a tired, ageing schoolmistress force her to rekindle the vivacity of her youth in the guise of “Miss Livvy”, Phoebe’s niece. With the war victory ball at the local barracks in full swing, “Miss Livvy” leads the officers, including Valentine, on a merry dance.
Carruthers’s production executes all of this with a knowing wink to modern mores. Designer Adrian Rees’s sets, which are dominated by three chocolate box Georgian paintings, are characterised by an ironic detachedness. His period costumes are a picture postcard delight.
The performances themselves combine the gentle satire of Barrie’s script with a contemporary tongue-in-cheek comedy. Fiona Wood is hilarious, playing Phoebe as a justifiably outraged, avenging feminist, while Alan Mirren is on sardonically cartoonish form as the dashing-yet-blundering Valentine.
A special mention must go to young Laura Costello, who is making her professional stage debut as part of the current Pitlochry ensemble. She impresses in the supporting role of Fanny Willoughby in Quality Street, but she deserves particular plaudits for her skilfully acted, brilliantly sung performance as LV in PFT’s current production of Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice.
Various dates until October 12
This review was originally published on the website of the Daily Telegraph on June 10, 2018
©Mark Brown
Scottish Stage 