| Reviewed by J. Peter Bergman
At the Copeke Theatre Company there’s been a takeover by the Brits. Carl Ritchie, the Producing Artistic Director has invited an old school chum from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art to take center stage for this mid-winter production and she has arrived fully loaded, with a production of "Bed Among the Lentils" from Alan Bennett’s collection of monodramas and a commentary play written for her by Nick Kidd about an actress cast in the same play. If that sounds complicated, wait. This is the sort of evening that requires a glossary and Ritchie has provided one in the program.
Both plays are serious and both are funny. Each one deals with a woman caught in a world of her own making. What both authors have done, and in part the complimentary nature of the evening depends upon this, is bring to life a woman living out her life to the best of her limited abilities; those abilities being limited only by each woman’s own sense of self-worth.
Bennett is at his comic best in his short thirty-four minute play about Susan, the wife of an Episcopal minister, known to his friends as Mrs. Vicar, who suffers from both boredom and a lack of belief to alcoholism and a need for affection. In a few brief scenes we learn about her life, her compulsions, her disdain, her appetites, her needs and her interests and her complacency. She is trapped in the world she has made for herself. She is, for all her complaints and her foolishness, endearing. We never cry for her, but we laugh along with her at the world she inhabits.
Kidd introduces us to a woman who ought to be able to manage her life better than the character she is hired to play. What makes Sophie so very interesting is her inability to comprehend the lines Bennett has written for her to say, the lines that draw the closest parallels between her own life and that of Susan, the woman she is playing. It isn’t until her final performance that she begins to realize the depth of her attraction to the part. We see what she never does see, however, the truth about her relationship to the woman written by Alan Bennett. They could be sisters; they could be one.
It is that undiscovered similarity that makes Sophie complete. The more we learn about her, the more we see her with her husband, with her friends, with her director, the more we come to understand the dilemma faced by Susan in the earlier play. Susan has taken the next steps; Sophie probably never will go that way because somehow another part will always come along - even if she has to wait six months or a year for her next role.
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| Leda Hodgson as Susan |
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