Review: Home for Christmas by Theatre in the Quarter

Dec 6 2009 Chester Chronicle

HOME FOR CHRISTMAS/Touring Cheshire until December 20

REVIEW/by Peggy Woodcock

THEATRE in the Quarter, Chester's bustling little professional company, has another triumph on its hands.

Home for Christmas, the seasonal offering now touring schools, village halls and churches around the city, is a worthy successor to last year's Silent Night – and that's high praise indeed.

Very different, it entertains with the same excellent, innovative, atmospheric theatre, packed with humour, music, song, drama. – and all on a postage stamp stage.

I caught the show at Bishops' Bluecoat CE High School on Thursday, after its launch in Chester's Forum Theatre, and so had first hand experience of what Theatre in the Quarter is all about – taking locally based theatre into the community.

It was a pleasure to see the involvement of the school, pupils checking tickets, selling programmes, and joining a packed audience. They had worked hard in the run-up judging by the themed displays – and I'm sure local enthusiasm will be evident as the show rolls out to sold-out venues.

On stage, Home for Christmas took us back to the spirit of the blitz in Chester during the Second World War, a complete contrast to Silent Night and the poignancy of the Christmas truce in the trenches of World War One.

Here we were on the home front, the war of the blackouts, falling bombs, air raid shelters, many a Captain Mainwaring hovering out there while the citizens of Chester fought Hitler any way they could and sang to keep their spirits up.

It was the era of make do and mend, of girls sweet on boys, of people saying TTFN. It was brilliantly conjured up with a ramshackle set festooned with paper chains, Chester's own radio station, writer Helen Newall's clever device for a musical play with a triple bonus.

There were the programmes, including the hammed up saga of Ted and Dora's illicit love affair and the priceless making of a Christmas pud with potato and gravy browning. And there the fun of the broadcasting, the rushing around and sound effects lavishly evident to us, the supposed studio audience.

And as it all went on we glimpsed the private traumas of the four gallant broadcasters, from hidden to homosexual love, from a husband missing on service to the white feathers given to a young man guilty only of being medically unfit for service.

Woven through it all was the reality of wartime Chester, close to the burning docks of Liverpool and often hit herself, home to thousands of bewildered evacuee children.

A tentative first half set the scenes and reassured the audience that, yes, it was alright to laugh at Dora's cut glass love for overly dramatic Ted! The show was richly funny, occasionally sad, and infused with music and song.

They made did and mended with original songs, marched onward with wartime favourites, and were comforted by familiar carols, all sung by a splendid community choir.

A superb second half had two diverse highlights.

First came drama with a 'rooftop' broadcast during a Luftwaffe raid which managed to vividly create both the scene and the view of a fire devastated Liverpool. Second came farce as, in a crowded basement the show must go on, hidden love must be spoken, and so it was in a glorious, 'ad libbed' chaos.

Brilliant stuff, and all credit to the versatile, multi-tasking cast, Roseanne Cochrane, Emma Hughes, Thomas Latham and Michael Magnet; to director Russ Tunney and to artistic and music director Matt Baker.