Warming look at life on the home front

WAR-TIME songs . . . from left, Anna Doolan, Laura Norton, Katherine Dow Blyton, with Simeon Truby on the piano

And a NIghtingale Sang..., Coliseum, Oldham

CECIL Taylor had a fitful career: one acknowledged masterpiece with “Good” — about the Holocaust — but quite a lot of small-scale, unpublished plays too.

Taylor’s influence was largely felt in the work of others: he helped to found a local theatre company and influenced several other writers with community-orientated plays seen by thousands at venues all over his adopted North-East.

Which brings us to this music-rich tragi-comedy, a tumbling, everything-within, fly-on-the-wall look at a Newcastle family from the day World War Two breaks out until its end.

In fact this is Taylor’s other hit: a warm, lively, mainly good-humoured slice of home-front life with songs of the day and a central family typical of the time: mum and dad and their two adult daughters and the girls’ grandfather, with the girls’ soldier-boy friends for added measure.

On first glance, the play is like Taylor’s career: lots going on, some of it significant and some of it a bit thin. But after a while the family’s charm prevails.

You follow them deeper into the war years, more deeply into their personal fears, secrets and lies and what emerges is a genuinely affecting, familiar portrait — with everyone in the audience rooting for leading character Helen, a good person struggling to overcome a handicap.

This Coliseum co-production is one of the more successful of the past few years, and comes to Oldham after two previous stops, meaning it is well run-in and displays impeccable timing.

Director Sarah Punshon pushes the first half hard, the result being a slightly frantic mix of jokes, songs and movement that hardly settles — though to be fair this is largely imposed by a similarly wayward script with lots of action and dialogue to little story-moving effect.

But after an hour or so the rhythm slows and the play starts to settle as the girls, Helen (the excellent Laura Norton) and Joyce (Anna Doolan) get more deeply involved with lover Norman (Jack Bennett) and husband Eric (Michael Imerson) respectively, and endure heartache and joy with the turning of the years.

A couple of the casting choices seem a little odd; both Ged McKenna and Katherine Dow Blyton, as grandad and mother, seem rather young for their characters (though both are otherwise fine), giving a slightly unconvincing air to a play that thrives on character realism. Luckily Simeon Truby is a strong fine-voiced, father, who always has a song to smooth things over.