Men Of The World – Keighley Playhouse

JOHN GODBER is apparently the third most watched English playwright after Shakespeare and Ayckbourn.

I am at a loss to understand, after watching this output from his pen, why he is so popular.

I think he over-complicates things in an attempt to be funny which puts huge pressures on a cast, particularly an amateur cast (even a gifted one as Keighley Playhouse always seem to provide) who in this production play 18 characters amongst the three of them.

For a start, I found the casting odd. One of the “men of the world” was a woman, Nikki Barrett, whose lead character was called Frank!

Obviously the three coach drivers were written as men.

I know that developing one character in a play can be an excruciating job and developing more than one cannot be done just by wearing a funny hat and pulling a different face.

It is hard enough for professional actors to pull off the trick successfully so even gifted amateurs have no chance.

To put this in context, I attended the final dress rehearsal which lacked the atmosphere created by a full audience and I felt that the laughter from the watchers was mainly at the real-life characters rather than the roles they were playing, or perhaps I just didn’t find it very funny.

I am sure that a full audience will fall about with laughter because Nikki and her fellow drivers, Andy Bean and Peter Whitley, do a sterling job and dir Kevin Moore has got the most out of a script rather too heavy on words and light on action for my taste.

The set, as usual, was very creative and full marks to the backstage crew who did an outstanding job.

Martin Carr