Weak plot, but they talk a good story

JUNE EVENING, Lyceum Theatre, Oldham

THE Lyceum Players draw their 80th anniversary season of specially-chosen revivals to a close with perhaps the slightest title on the list.

Bolton playwright Bill Naughton’s June Evening — a gentle meander down the street and among the lives of working-class Twenties families during a miner’s strike — was originally written in the Fifties as a radio play, and the lack of action is a fairly clear reminder of this.

Even when Naughton rewrote the work for the stage a few years later, he clearly found it hard to inject much movement. But what the play does have is a lovely and detailed sense of place and character, from crowded families to bookies runners and the corner shop, to the local midwife and the young couple in need of her services.

The work is a curiously old-fashioned, tragi-comic slice of life being grim up North while the miners are out on strike, times are hard, babies are on the way and elderly matriarchs are in the way.

It is funny in places — particularly after the interval, short, and full of strong and supportive women and limp, ineffectual men.

Nigel Marland directs a surprisingly subdued cast — at least in the first half — of mostly Lyceum regulars.

To be honest there isn’t a lot for them to get their teeth into, except perhaps mastery of old Lancashire phrases and the wearing of shawls and wes’cuts, and the ordering of half a pound of ox-heart and a packet of Wisk.

After the break the very short second half has the amusing build up to the birth of the first baby of harridan-in-the-making Polly, and downtrodden sop likewise Jack, charmingly played by Suzanne Clayton and Sam Al-Hamdani — particularly the latter, whose looks of bewilderment are endearingly human.

Sue Widdall and Roz Hendren also get under the skin of their respective, busybodying characters, especially in the more interesting second half.

But elsewhere the evening often seems a little hung-together and unaffecting, with superficial characterisation. I suspect Naughton’s plot, or lack of it, may have a lot to do with this, no matter how authentic his dialogue.