Dangerous Corner – Pacific Playhouse, 14^th May 2008

People nowadays have a tendency to set their phone to play a particularly ghastly bit of pop music instead of just ringing. And not just, I’m sorry to tell you, young people and jacks-the-lad. So some train journeys now can be like being forced, unwilling, to listen to a particularly bad episode of ‘Bottom of the Pops’. As bad as being at home with the children. Were it not for the two ladies in front of me shouting at each other in some strange dialect of Spanish, either Arabic with a Spanish accent, or Spanish with an Arabic accent.

And the children; or rather, the child. One stop up the line, this young lady gets on bedecked with children: Several perambulators, and a gaggle of walkers round her ankles. And she immediately takes the largest boy and plonks him down beside me. “Oh dear”, I thought, “I’m not going to like this. This is going to test my tolerance to the full”. I consoled myself that London Bridge was only 15 minutes away. You can put up with anything for 15 minutes, can’t you? And, do you know, he was as good as gold: quiet as a lamb. Perhaps that’s why she has so many children: perhaps people are so impressed with her parenting skills they press their own children on her. I thought of asking her to have a word with the two shouting ladies; or some of the phone-poppers.

The Pacific Playhouse certainly merits being called ‘Intimate Theatre’: the Loos are on the stage! The second act nearly started with two old ladies locked in the lavatory. That’s some audience participation.

This play, the programme tells me, was written in 1932, by J B Priestley. The music playing as we were seated was 30’s music, and the singing was German. I recognised one piece, the Comedian-Harmonists singing “Wochensend und Sonnenschein”, the curious translation of “Happy Days are Here Again”. So I thought we were in for a piece about appeasement and the coming war; but we weren’t; only a foreign radio station.

It was played absolutely straight, with cut-glass accents and evening dress and constant boozing. I rather think the thirties characters they were playing would not have been fooled, but they all sounded like the Queen to me.

It’s quite hard to drag an audience into a piece which is quite so dated in its manners. When the Victorian melodrama was revived, it usually had the audience in stitches. The immortal line of the unrecognised mother grieving over her dead child, “dead, dead, and never called me ‘mother’” became a music hall catch-phrase.

It had some real classic lines: an alibi collapsed when it was pointed out that the post didn’t include parcels on a Saturday afternoon at Fallowfield, another when “the garage told me you took the Lower Loxley Road, so you must have been going to see Martin”. I expected some argument about train times.

And those lines that thirties writers, even as good as JB Priestley, couldn’t’ seem to resist: “that doesn’t happen in real life”, or “you’re acting like you’re in some sort of melodrama”.

There were some difficulties with the dated language, with ‘queer’ meaning queer, and ‘gay’ meaning gay, (just to be clear, they used the word 'pervert’ to mean homosexual.

I’m pleased to say they carried it all off splendidly, ‘cos I rather like that sort of thing, and the audience didn’t get too giggly till the end. It is a complement to the audience to play the period dead straight. This audience only managed beta-minus.

I just missed my train on the way home, so there was a compulsory visit to the London Bridge bar. This is quite reminiscent of the thirties, like the tearoom in “Brief Encounter”. People in station bars always look like they wish they were somewhere else. Including the couple beside me, arguing loudly in French; about actually being somewhere else. At one point, he just rushed out of the bar, leaving her a bit non-plussed. But he came back quite soon, saying “five minutes” (well, “cinq minutes”, actually).

Late night trains are full of sadness. There are always a lot of people who have not had a good time. Often accompanied by far to much booze.