PROGRAMMING a repertory regional theatre ideally should complement the in-house productions with touring shows of quality, intrigue, topicality, fresh names, discovery and rediscovery.
Shows don't tend to hang around too long, but keep your eye on the Yorkshire theatre websites and plenty of short, sharp visits can provide rich reward. Or in these cases, provided rich reward, because they have alas been and gone.
Robert Holman's German Skerries popped into the Stephen Joseph Theatre for four days, marking the Scarborough bow of Up In Arms, Alice Hamilton's touring company.
Reasons to see the first major revival of this 1977 work were two-fold: Up In Arms have pedigree as Off West End award winners and Robert Holman is a playwright's playwright, a past resident dramatist at both the RSC and the National Theatre, but you see hen's teeth more often.
A playwright of your reviewer's acquaintance recounted how one reaction to German Skerries had been that "not much happened". Not by comparison with melodramatic TV soaps, maybe, but Holman's play of meetings and departures still encompasses friendship, marriage, a death, young love, pollution, ecology, north-eastern industrial decline, the working man and birdwatching in its unbroken 90 minutes. No, "not much happened", did it?!
It is more that Holman is a stealthy writer of quiet observations, the minor key, the imperceptibly shifting sands and the ubiquitous tea flask, gradually reeling you in with a sense of murky mystery, topped off by a brilliant, radiant performance by Katie Moore alongside George Evans and Howard Ward.
Emily Bowker and Graeme Brookes in Invincible
Torben Betts, by comparison, goes for the broader strokes, the flashier blade, in his international hit state-of-the-nation play Invincible, a class-war comedy drama brought to Hull Truck by Alastair Whatley's The Original Theatre Company for three days.
England in 2012, football, jingoism, New Labour, cot death, cat death, Tony Blair, young soldiers in Afghanistan, the North-South divide, infidelity and the value of art, work, life and death, all find their combative way into a briskly whisked portrait of a modern England with nothing to celebrate.
While he pulls no punches, Christopher Harper's chalk-and-cheese cast of Whatley and Emily Bowker's malcontent middle-class couple and their new neighbours in the north, Graeme Brookes's boring ex-Royal Navy chef Alan and Kerry Bennett's bored Dawn, are a meeting of Alan Ayckbourn and John Godber characters. Betts's world is destructive, not invincible.
Next up from this Ayckbourn protege is a return to the Stephen Joseph Theatre, where he took his early playwriting steps in a residency. The world premiere of The National Joke, Betts's new home truths on family life, vaulting political ambitions and Britain today, will run in the summer rep between June 8 and August 20. Box office: 01723 370541 or at sjt.uk.com
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