Thirteen-year-old Paul Blake has been left at the preparatory school he owns and inhabits over the 1956 Easter break with his grandmother and three members of staff. While the play eludes to Paul's painful yet exciting journey to adolescence, nothing much actually happens, Paul never really seems pained, or excited.
With an assured performance by Navah Chapman, carrying the play on his shoulders, and largely pulling it off, the play really comes alive in his scenes with director Terry, playing the embattled Latin master Mr "Matey" Maitland. I admire Chapman for taking on such a large part, holding his own with only adult actors, seemingly understanding the humour in his role, and for allowing me to hear every word, with awesome diction to boot.
Directed very much like the puppet show Paul discusses throughout the piece, we see a Geppetto-type character pulling the strings, in Carolyn Allan's Mrs Blake, along with her characters in Maitland, and Mr and Mrs Edwards (Bernard Long and Lynne Long), seemingly only existing because she allows them to.
Long's Mrs Edwards is played like a Disney villain and I spend the play excited I might see her accompanied by a pen of Dalmatians, or that a house may indeed fly in and land on her head – but alas the character is left over-played and uninteresting. While the audience giggles as Long spits her lines across the stage the character would have benefited from being less maniacal and more menacing, with simple light and darkness more at the forefront.
More of a melodrama than the content may have wished it to be, Foxton's production is ambitious in origin, but not in delivery, finishing very much on a flat note, having me wondering if it should have been called Shrove Tuesday, rather then Lent.
