Substance gives way to style

CIDER WITH ROSIE, Oldham Coliseum

I do wonder just what the people of the Gloucestershire village of Slad thought of the young Laurie Lee.

He did go on a bit, putting the locals in print, never using one description for winter ice when three would do, and generally being the “only poet in the village”.

But regarding this rural memoir of the seasons, his childhood, the last years of closed village life and the end of a millennium of living simply, off the land, you have to be quite thankful that he was a bit flowery.

It’s a beautiful piece of writing, lyrical but unsentimental, created with the poet’s ear for detail and the critical eye of someone who recognised that he was living in rapidly changing times.

But the book is excessively hard to stage; episodic and sketchy, with characters described with a few poetic lines, rather than in passages with any real meat.

And it is a problem not successfully surmounted by this touring production from the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, in a new adaptation by Daniel O’Brien.

This is one of those modern, everything-within affairs, with half a dozen actors furiously swapping characters before picking up this or that instrument, to accompany or sing a folksy tune intended to set the period, or specially composed to set off some of Lee’s poetry.

In the first half in particular, sketches of childhood come and go and characters are introduced so, well, sketchily, with so much emphasis on the incidental music, that we barely have time to register who they are, what their relationship is, and whether we care very much.

Added to this is a strangely muted set, all hanging rural objects and dark general lighting, which leaves the impression of a rather monotonous time of it.

But in the second act, as the style gives away to greater substance, everything settles to become more coherent and enjoyable, with Lee’s relationships with his friends and family better defined in dialogue.

That’s not to say that the six actors in question are anything less than exemplary, including MD and composer T J Holmes, who plays youngest brother Tony when he isn’t playing accordion or harmonica.

Alongside him, Devon Black, Antony Eden, Amy Humphreys, Joannah Tincey and Liam Tobin play dozens of characters with great interaction. If only director Abigail Anderson had gone for more dialogue and a little less “design” from the start.