Well, the Weather Gods threw everything at us on Saturday night. Bright red, perspiring people everywhere I looked, hot, frantically fanning themselves… and yet… we put on a great show!!! From the first really enthusiastic applause, I knew we would be alright on the night, so to speak!
In Part One, using a series of clever sketches, song and poems, we depicted a monumental travel through time. I especially loved the opener with Mr Ramsbottom, Mr Miller and Mr Weaver and the audience did too. The demise of poor King ‘Arold went down a storm and Bill’s Best Bits (Shakespeare revisited) made people chuckle. And who can forget the image of Fergie dancing around a tractor in polka dot boxers? Although the mood was generally upbeat, there were poignant moments and this added depth to the first half.
Part Two gathered momentum right from the start. As a relative newcomer to ETC, it was really interesting to watch snippets from plays long gone, such as Absurd Person Singular with Maggie’s poor hostess being shut out in the rain and from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The crowd favourite had to be the kiss scene in the Vicar of Dibley, or was it Dancing Queen, or the two duos from Quartet, or Calendar Girls, or the parrot scene in ‘Allo ‘Allo?? It was all so good and really funny. Rounding it all off with Jenny and I dancing the light fantastic from ‘Farndale’ was lovely and also sad; these characters are finally being put to bed. This is the double edge to a retrospective: it’s wonderful to see life breathed back into these fantastic shows, just for a few moments, but melancholic too, because these moments are all too fleeting.
However, now the heat is off us (quite literally) for this performance, another show is waiting in the wings and another set of memories will shortly be forged from the ashes!
Rebecca Shields