Reviews

Within the grand halls of Checkmate Manor, murder is rampant and each of the chess pieces that fall is inevitably connected to another character’s grisly demise. Well, that is the play being performed by the passionate, but relatively hopeless, members of the Townswomen’s Guild Dramatic Society. The audience has the challenge of solving the crimes and determining who is the murderer, while laughing continuously at this passionate debacle.

The Campervan Tales is a collection of short plays by local author James Forte. Six plays, all under 15 minutes, and telling a variety of stories, there is probably something to appeal to all tastes in the compilation.

Playing in two different venues over the very short (two night) season, the sets are necessarily simple, but this allows the acting and storytelling to shine.

Jean Webster’s 1912 novel set in turn-of-the-century New England has been musicalised before. Hugh Martin wrote a hit West End adaptation of it called Love From Judy in 1952 and three years later Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron turned the story into a very successful Hollywood musical, Daddy Long Legs. But there’s no splashy song-and-dance numbers in this version, which is written for a cast of two.

François Cervantes takes a very lateral approach to this myth and explores the reaction of three women who are trying to make sense of the atrocities committed by Medea. The set design creates a great sense of a story unfolding on a blank page. The stark white background made of up what looks like large scrolls of paper is a fantastic backdrop for this gruesome narrative.