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Angie Millard’s York theatre collective make debut with still shocking Sixties’ Orton farce

York Actors Collective director Angie Millard, left, and stage manager Em Peattie

YORK Actors Collective, the like-minded group set up by theatre director, critic and theatre and film studies tutor Angie Millard, will make their debut with Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane next month.

Premiered in the West End in 1964, Orton’s controversial farce still has the power to shock almost 50 years later with its story of Kath bringing home a lodger: the amoral and psychopathic Mr Sloane.

Her father recognises him from his past life and challenges Mr Sloane’s honesty, but when her brother Ed arrives, everything turns more complicated. A tense sexual struggle for Mr Sloane ensues as he plays one sibling off against the other while their father is caught in the crossfire.

The roles at Theatre@41, Monkgate, from March 15 to 18 go to Victoria Delaney as Kath, York St John University student Ben Weir as Mr Sloane, Chris Pomfrett as Ed and Mick Liversidge as the father, Dada Kemp.

“Victoria and Chris have been involved with the new group since last summer,” says Angie. “We talked about so many plays, plays that would have audience appeal but also be challenging for the performers.

A troublesome triangle: Ben Weir’s Mr Sloane, left, with Victoria Delaney’s Kath and Chris Pomfrett’s Ed in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane. Picture: John Saunders

“Entertaining Mr Sloane was one. Joe Orton died too young [aged 34 on August 9 1967], so there aren’t that many plays and they’re not performed that often. I think people are a bit frightened of him, but the thing I love about him is the way he takes a theatrical form and updates it totally to his time, the Sixties. The language is brilliant; the writing is so funny.”

Angie continues: “The other big thing about Orton is that he was writing at a time of censorship, and the innuendo in the play is there to help him get away with things – and he did! He got away with murder! Especially when the censors were looking for homosexuality without recognising it.”

Controversy still surrounds Orton. “I find his treatment of women difficult in his plays, like his treatment of Kath. He makes her grotesque, and finally when she gets her revenge, in a way he had to do that for the shape of the play,” says Angie.

“Left to his own devices, he wouldn’t have done it, but he was such a master of theatrical form, though not of detail. It means I have to work very hard to work out how to get props on and off because he’s forgotten about them.”

Orton’s savagely sharp, confrontational dramas present challenges to director and cast alike. “I like to look at a play and see what you can do with it, and then you make your decisions about it. Orton’s estate are keen that you don’t change words, but rather than Kath having to be naked [as denoted in the play], Victoria is making her look seductive, clothed,” says Angie.

Ed-lock: Chris Pomfrett’s Ed and Mick Liversidge’s Dada Kemp in York Actors Collective’s debut production of Entertaining Mr Sloane. Picture: John Saunders

“We’re playing it in the period setting – the 1960s – and there are things like racist references in there, but because Kath takes a non-racist attitude, it works.

“There are lots of times where her brother Ed treats her shabbily too – they have a very unhappy, complex relationship – and you realise he could easily be transported to 2023 and still behave like that in the home.”

Looking back to the Sixties and the prevailing attitudes towards women at the time, Angie says: “I was a young student in London, at college doing drama and then going to university after that, and men treated you in a certain way; they all did, but that was the culture of the time. When I hear women complain now, I understand, but I also think, ‘you should have been there in the Sixties; that behaviour was the norm’.”

From Sheffield originally, Angie and her husband Clive moved to York ten years ago, since when she has played her part in the arts world, whether directing Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman In Mind for York Settlement Community Players or writing reviews for York Calling. 

Now, she has formed her own troupe. “I don’t know if any other group would have put on this play, saying ‘it’s too shocking. No-one will come’. But York deserves to be shocked! If you fall shy of that, then you don’t see the theatre you deserve,” she says.

“I find his treatment of women difficult in his plays,” says director Angie Millard of Joe Orton. Here Ben Weir’s Mr Sloane attacks Victoria Delaney’s Kath. Picture: John Saunders

“I’m putting my own money into this project. People have hobbies that they put their money into, and I’m equating what I’m doing with that. I’d like to break even, and if people come along, we shall continue and do another play.”

Should you be wondering why the York Actors Collective is so called, Angie says: “I wanted to call it a ‘cooperative’ but everyone else wanted ‘collective’, and I thought ‘fair enough’! But whatever the name, it’s a passion project that I really wanted to do, where like-minded actors aim to produce entertaining and thought-provoking theatre.

“I don’t think Entertaining Mr Sloane is Orton’s best play. That would be What The Butler Saw, but by not doing this play you would be losing out on what is superb about it: it’s an actor’s play, a character play, where you really get into those characters’ situations.”

And so, the York Actors Collective is born.

York Actors Collective in Entertaining Mr Sloane, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, March 15 to 18, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

Did you know?

ENTERTAINING Mr Sloane lead actress Victoria Delaney also will be appearing in York Settlement Community Players’ production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing at York Theatre Royal Studio from April 5 to 15. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

Copyright of The Press, York

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REVIEW: York Settlement Community Players in Ayckbourn’s Woman In Mind ****

Desperately seeking Susan, as she loses her mind: Victoria Delaney in the Settlement Players’ Woman In Mind. All pictures: John Saunders

Woman In Mind, York Settlement Community Players, York Theatre Royal Studio, until Saturday, 7.45pm and 2.45pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

ANGIE Millard “seemed to have avoided Alan Ayckbourn” in her past directorial choices, but she had one play in mind for the Settlement Players’ return to York Theatre Royal after two years.

Ayckbourn’s sad, haunting, darker than dark-humoured psychological drama Woman In Mind had struck a chord in the pandemic climate of isolation and mental health issues.

Premiered in 1985 but still feeling present day in 2022, it remains Ayckbourn’s supreme study of a trapped woman, older than Nora in A Doll’s House but just as affecting as the desperate flight of Henrik Ibsen’s proto-feminist, Susan’s story being told from inside her woozy head.

The setting is 48 hours in her south London garden and beyond: the place where the world is refracted through the prism of Susan’s psyche.

Playing fantasy families: Victoria Delaney’s Susan raises a glass to husband Andy (Paul French), daughter Lucy (Amy Hall) and brother Tony (Neil Vincent)

Following in the footsteps of Julia McKenzie, Stockard Channing and Helen Mirren, in her first stage role since October 2019, Victoria Delaney opens the play on her back and never leaves the stage (interval aside).

Delaney’s suburban housewife is coming round from unconsciousness, after knocking herself out when stepping on a garden rake, as Chris Pomfrett’s cautious yet accident-prone family doctor, Bill Windsor, attends to her. In a brilliant Ayckbourn conceit, his words, like her vision, go from a gobbledygook blur to being clear.

With the bang on the head comes the comforting concern of her champagne-golden  family, as if torn from a Mills & Boon cover or a desirable clothes catalogue: first, handsome old devil husband Andy (Paul French); then tennis-playing brother Tony (Neil Vincent) and her auburn-haired darling of a daughter, Lucy (YSCP debutante Amy Hall).

Too, too perfect, surely, and yet played as straight down the line as Tony practising a backhand winner, they could – at first at least – be real. We see and hear them, just as Susan sees and hears them, but only she does so, just like only urbane novelist Charles Condomine and the audience see and hear his deceased first wife, Elvira, in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit.

Living on a prayer: Paul Toy as vicar Gerald

The grim reality is very different: husband Gerald (clergyman’s son Paul Toy) is a self-obsessed priggish vicar, always in another room writing his interminably dull, interminably long parish history since 1387. They have reached the separate bed stage already.

Live-in sister-in-law Muriel (Helen Wilson) is obsessed with reconnecting with her late husband and is forever making foul-tasting beverages and even fouler meals, defeated by the lack of labelling on kitchen ingredients.

Wastrel son Rick (YSCP newcomer Frankie-Jo Anderson) is estranged and strange, having joined a cult in Hemel Hempstead, but suddenly he arrives with news.

Where once Susan loved being a wife and mother, now she is neglected by husband and son alike and unfulfilled in her humdrum, loveless domestic domain, Symbolically, the garden plants in Richard Hampton’s design are reduced to twigs, with the only flowers being on the backdrop tapestries, Susan’s bench and Muriel’s cardigan. What lies ahead beyond Susan’s disillusioned forties, her days as frustrating and stuck as a buffering laptop screen?

Muriel (Helen Wilson) serves up another gruesome beverage to vicar Gerald’s (Paul Toy) distaste

Ayckbourn, and in turn Millard and Delaney, capture a “woman on the verge”, and as the real and unreal worlds collide increasingly beyond her control, so too do the ever-blackening humour and pathos, her sanity crumbling and the words returning once more to gobbledygook.

Delaney’s performance is deeply unsettling, her Susan being full of vulnerability, waspish of tongue, her mind grasping desperately at the cliff’s edge, happiness out of reach.

Pomfrett, in particular, provides the comedy, perfectly in step with Ayckbourn’s rhythms; Toy makes the supercilious vicar utterly unbearable but splendidly sets himself up for laughter at his expense; Wilson judges just right how to be annoying yet not annoying as the never-wanted-where-she-is Muriel. Anderson’s disingenuous Rick would fall out with anyone.

French, Hall and Vincent are perfectly well cast as the fantasy family that gradually turns into a nightmare and Woman In Mind becomes a woman out of her mind.

Angie Millard was right: Ayckbourn’s play has indeed taken on even more resonance under the pandemic microscope, where already unhappy marriages have cracked under the strain and the desire to escape has been heightened in enforced isolation.

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‘There are so few plays that feature a woman like this,’ says Woman In Mind director Angie Millard. ‘Hedda Gabler and that’s it.’ Meet Alan Ayckbourn’s Susan

Victoria Delaney and Neil Vincent shelter under an umbrella in a February rehearsal for the Settlement Players’ production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman In Mind. Picture: John Saunders

ANGIE Millard has directed myriad plays but “seemed to have avoided” Alan Ayckbourn…until now.

“The present climate of isolation and mental health issues led me to Woman In Mind, which is a perfect choice for this time,” she says, ahead of her York Settlement Community Players production opening on Saturday in the York Theatre Royal Studio.

One of 87 full-length works by the Scarborough playwright, 1985’s Woman In Mind’s portrait of a woman in the verge finds housewife Susan stuck, unfulfilled and neglected in her humdrum marriage.

As played by Victoria Delaney, who remains on stage throughout, Susan’s growing disillusionment with everyday life is brought to a head when she steps on a garden rake and is knocked unconscious.

Whereupon her minor concussion and hallucinations combine to surround Susan with the ideal fantasy family, handsomely dressed in tennis whites as they sip champagne. However, when her real and imaginary worlds collide, those fantasies take on a nightmarish life of their own in Ayckbourn’s hotbed of humour and pathos.

“You can see Ayckbourn’s plays over and over again and still see something new in them each time; they’re so rich in detail,” says Angie. “I love Woman In Mind, and I’m working with very talented and creative people who make every rehearsal a joy, though the problem we’ve faced is the limited amount of time we’ve had to rehearse.

“We’ve been doing just three hours on Sundays, two hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, with the Mondays for intensive sessions for the two-hander scenes, followed by a week in tech.

Victoria Delaney: On stage from start to finale in Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman In Mind

“You need the time to explore the lines, to find the humour, to bring a light touch to it, as it’s that subtle, offhand way that Ayckbourn has in his writing.”

Explaining her reasoning behind selecting Woman In Mind, Angie says: “Because of Susan. I feel there are so few plays that feature a woman like this. Hedda Gabler and that’s it.

“That’s important now in a society where people are having mental health problems – and Susan has massive mental health problems. The pandemic has also thrown up an increased awareness of isolation and of not being happy in a relationship, which has been exacerbated in the lockdowns.”

Angie notes how Susan’s husband Gerald, busy writing his magnus opus on the history of the parish, “doesn’t know how to deal with Susan”. “Men in Ayckbourn’s plays rarely do. It’s a position they take where, over the years, they slide away from their responsibilities in relationships or in their workplace, and that’s rarely something women get to do,” she says.

“But this is where Ayckbourn is really clever, because you also see Susan for who she is. You ask yourself, ‘why did she marry him?’. When Gerald asks, ‘what did I do wrong?’, she says, ‘’Married me’.

“Yes, he’s let her down, he’s a disappointment, but marriages are about a contract and a bargain. It’s about acceptance.” 

Putting Susan’s character on the psychiatrist’s couch, Angie says: “Most people who end up unwell mentally have an addiction, though with Susan, I can’t attribute an addiction to her, except an addiction to perfection.

York Settlement Community Players’ poster for Woman In Mind

“If you’re classically depressed, it’s because the world doesn’t see you as you see yourself, but you have to get over that and not see yourself as so important.”

Victoria Delaney will be joined in Millard’s cast by company stalwarts Chris Pomfrett, Paul Toy, Helen Wilson and Paul French and newcomers Frankie-Jo Anderson, Neil Vincent and Amy Hall in Settlement Players’ first Theatre Royal production since Chekhov’s The Seagull in pre-Covid March 2020.

“This is the first role I’ve done since Covid started,” says Victoria. “My last one was in a play I wrote myself, Mad Alice, in October 2019, and my plan at the time was to start my own company, do a Yorkshire tour and then maybe take it to the Edinburgh Fringe, but then the pandemic happened and it just wasn’t possible. I’ll wait for things to settle down and then I can return to that plan or more writing.

“So, when I saw the casting call-out for Woman In Mind, I jumped at it. I did my research and requested to audition for two roles, Susan and Muriel, as I love comedy and I would have loved to play Muriel too, but what a peach of a part Susan is.”

Victoria initially took a break from her professional acting career after her divorce to focus on being a single mum with an autistic son – who will turn 20 in the summer – and she now works remotely from home giving legal advice on Zoom to families with special educational needs up to the age of 25.

Her acting and writing come into play when the opportunity arises.  “But in my work, I do also sometimes have to think creatively about how the law might get over a problem,” she says.

Rehearsing for an Ayckbourn play has been such a stimulating challenge. “It’s a comedy but it’s a dark comedy, which means I can show lots of sides to Susan. There are moments where I can play the comedy; moments where she’s really vulnerable, or indignant, or annoyed,” says Victoria.

“I’m going to really miss her because she takes you over,” says Victoria Delaney of playing housewife Susan in Woman In Mind. Here she is pictured by John Saunders, masked up in the rehearsal studio

“There’s just so much to her character, and because I never leave the stage, I get to interact with so many characters. I’m going to really miss her because she takes you over. I’ve been called for every rehearsal because Susan is in every scene, and as I have to go through so many emotions, I then need to let those emotions , that adrenaline, seep away.”

To learn all those lines, “I’ve been walking around the village, doing laps at 6am, listening to the play,” says Victoria, who lives in Wheldrake.

She finds liberation in playing a character of such emotional contrasts. “I’ll say things on stage that I would never say myself. Things that I would consider rude. I’d have too many filters to go through to say them!” she says.

“But the absolute drug of acting is to be able to show the audience all these emotions, this sadness, and when you feel them connect with you, I love that connection.

“I’ve meet lot of actors that have a certain shyness about them in their own lives. I mask it, but I have a shy side, and when people say, ‘but you go out on stage’, I say, ‘yes, but I’m playing someone else and I love doing that’.”

As chance would have it, when facing such a demanding week ahead, “luckily the performances are over half-term”, says Victoria, breathing a little more easily at the prospect.

York Settlement Community Players in Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman In Mind, York Theatre Royal Studio, Saturday until February 26, except February 20; 7.45pm plus 2.45pm, February 26. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.