LIVE, home-grown community entertainment can be every bit as slick, witty and well acted as anything on the British stage anywhere, as Grasmere Players showed in their recent production of a A Grasmere Get-together. Written to mark the centenaries of Grasmere Village Hall and the Lakes Artists Society, the 150th anniversary of the village school, and the 160th anniversary of Wordsworth's attack on proposals for a railway, it proved an excellent way to celebrate some of the ways in which Grasmere is unique.
Supported by little else than an excellent musical director and pianist (Gilly Hodkinson), five plastic chairs and an empty beer crate, a cast of Grasmere Players relied heavily on the power of words to relive memorable moments dramatised from Grasmere's past. Compiled and produced by Vivienne Rees, A Variety of Village Memories, Mirth and Music used a number of sources, including the famous Grasmere Dialect Plays by the formidable Mrs Rawnsley, together with entries in the school log book and the Grasmere Hall Company's minutes book. But most powerful by far were the words of the people of Grasmere themselves, taken from interviews recorded by Ambleside Oral History Group. Recalling life in their own words, their extracts provided verbal images so vivid that props, costumes or painted scenery would have appeared superfluous. There were tales from the schoolroom, the farm and the fells, and wartime was well represented too, from firsthand accounts of the Somme to the hilarious "Dad's Army" antics of Grasmere Home Guard in world war two.
The cast of five delivered a stream of pathos and humour as they moved seamlessly through time, with Richard Hardisty's gentle dialect speech at the heart of it all, supported with sparkle and effortless versatility by Nigel Crook, Penny Blackburn and Paul and Elaine Nelson. Vivienne Rees's novel dramatisation of the area's large oral history archive should be an inspiration to other drama groups and holds exciting possibilities for future productions throughout Cumbria and even beyond.
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