From Lord of the Flies to I’m a Celebrity, the concept of a group of people stranded in the wilderness, slowly unravelling and turning on each other has always been fascinating.
Now imagine it’s a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-management, menopausal women “shipwrecked” on a tiny island on Derwent Water in the Lake District on a cold November night – all the right ingredients for comedy and potential tragedy are there.
Sheila’s Island is Calendar Girls writer Tim Firth’s reimagining of his earlier play, Neville’s Island, which was the same premise for a group of men. It provides a brilliant platform for an all-female cast to get to grips with some deliciously flawed and challenging characters.
Directed by Lesley Woodhouse, The Guild of Players’ cast of Andrea Thompson (Fay), Gerry Griffin (Denise), Jo Cooper (Julie), and Julie Alison (Sheila) all threw themselves convincingly into their individual roles with hilarious, raw and extremely brave performances.
The play is a comedy, and this production was first and foremost incredibly funny. However, Sheila’s Island also tackles some difficult and uncomfortable subject matter – including mental health issues and bullying and there was no shying away from it.
Some of Denise’s appalling attitudes to her colleagues’ differences (born out of her own loneliness and dissatisfaction we learn), along with her cutting humour had me sliding down my seat a little, literally cringing.
And so invested do we become in poor Fay’s fragility, I was on the edge of that same seat terrified of what might happen to her in the end.
Sheila’s stoic attempts to keep up morale and poor Julie’s too-good-to-be-true domestic situation were equally brilliantly portrayed.
One of the stars of the show was the set. How to bring a foggy, damp Lake District island onto the Theatre Royal stage must have been a head scratcher, but Stage Manager Hamish Bell and his team, with the help of Dale Muir on lighting and sound design, did a fantastic job of creating rocks, trees, water and, most importantly, atmosphere.
The cast had to juggle with a vast collection of props – from sausages to side plates, a sabre and even a falcon – all done seamlessly.
Not once did this ever seem like an amateur production. Hats off to everyone who clearly worked so hard to give Dumfries theatre goers such a treat.
REVIEW BY CAROL HOGARTH
