REVIEW: Waiting for God, People's Theatre
Another TV sitcom finds a stage afterlife
One who definitely isn’t waiting for God is Diana, former war photographer and atheist.
What she’s doing in the Bayview Retirement Home, God only knows. She’s as sharp as a tack – intelligent, acerbic and nobody’s fool.
She’s certainly alert to the tricks of a penny-pinching management, embodied by manager Harvey Bains – mean, conceited and too silly to see that his assistant, Jane, is infatuated with him.
She’s pretty silly too, though. Must be.
The play begins with Diana acquiring a new next-door-neighbour, Tom, whose apparent dottiness may be a ruse.
That would be my strategy if ever dumped – as he has been by dim, henpecked son Geoffrey – in a place like Bayview. Feign something. Anything.
Michael Aitkens’ stage version of his early 1990s sitcom makes no claim to be high – or even middling – art. It’s midsummer fare, good for a titter and with an attitude to the elderly that occasionally (to my mind) swings in the direction of being mildly patronising.
I never wholly warmed to it although full marks to Jim Boylan and Karen Elliott who work hard to make Tom and Diana stand out in a largely two dimensional cast of characters.
There are some funny lines.
“If you met me on a holiday you’d know you’d made a terrible mistake,” snarls Diana, one-time frequenter of war zones.
And her well concealed softer side does emerge when niece Sarah gets pregnant and gives birth to a baby which comes ready-wrapped, or appears to in this production.
Everything’s satisfactorily resolved in the end with two weddings and a funeral all mixed up… and that brings the curtain down on a People’s season which has given us a wide variety of plays and some memorable productions.
The new season begins on September 8 with The Son, French playwright Florian Zeller’s follow-up (translated by Christopher Hampton) to The Father, an absorbing People’s Theatre Studio offering of 2023.
That’s to be followed by a production of Home, I’m Darling, Laura Wade’s highly praised play about a 21st Century woman living the life of a 1950s housewife because… well, I dare say that will be revealed.
Both of those look well worth catching. This year’s panto, if you can bear to think of winter, is to be The Wizard of Oz.
But all that’s for the future.
In the here and now, Waiting for God runs until Saturday, July 19. Tickets from the People’s Theatre website.