I must say a mid-week supper theatre is the way to go. Especially since it starts bang on time at 6.30 p.m. and one is home and snug by 8.30 p.m. in time to watch Masterchef and then go to bed. The one-act play produced by CATS was staged at On The Go in Race Course.
Ever Young , and as the title suggests, is about four old ladies exchanging notes about their lives and loves. Phoebe Payne-Dexter, Agnes Dorchester, William Blanchard and Caroline Courtney-Page are four women from the upper crust (as the hyphenated names will have told you) who sit in a strategic corner of a hotel lobby so as to better observe and comment upon the going-ons of anyone who wanders into their line of vision.
But soon they turn to their own group to catch up and the result is entertaining. Phoebe-Payne-Dexter is the ‘terrifying dowager kind’ who relishes putting young people in their place, and thinks nothing of melting down her wedding ring and resetting her diamonds to tell the world she is single and ready to mingle, now that her husband is dead. Agnes, on the other hand, is a sweeter and milder woman, still all caught up in her knitting and grandchildren and love for her dead husband. They are both taken aback when Mrs Blanchard limps in and announces that she has divorced her husband of 40 years! She revels in her new-found freedom and a hefty alimony that she is putting to good use at the casino. Caroline Courtney-Page, with her fabulous pearls, completes the group. She has been engaged many times, married once and now engaged once again. And each of her relationships has manifested itself as a string of pearls that she wears proudly. Of course, there is a mystery and a story that connects these women, or is there?
The combination of gossipy women on restricted diets, knitting needles, reset diamonds and walking sticks, while being funny, also carried a whiff of feminism. Not surprising, as the playwright, Alice Eyra Gerstenberg, came from a well-to-do family and was well travelled. She could afford to say what she thought at a time when it was probably not done for 70-year-olds to divorce their husbands or launch into a romantic dalliance. Her one-act-plays were meant to be performed in intimate settings, by the fireside, in drawing rooms, in the garden, or, in this case, at That’s Y On The Go.
Spending an evening with four faintly batty women and then having a delicious meal from the kitchen of On The Go is an experience one would want to revisit, soon. For those who missed the play, you can catch it at The Residency this evening.
