What will audiences want after the pandemic? Will it be daft comedies by Noël Coward? Or will they have an appetite for Pulitzer-winning cancer dramas such as Margaret Edson’s Wit? That’s the dilemma faced by Jan Black in Johnny McKnight’s warm-hearted new play. She and her am-dram company have been given the go-ahead for a November run at Ayr’s Gaiety theatre and, with a singing ban ruling out a musical, they must predict the public mood by choosing just the right popular classic.
She has her eye on Blithe Spirit; her younger colleagues in the Gaiety Whirlers fancy something edgier.
The answer lies in the opening moments of Jack Nurse’s production for the Gaiety and Wonder Fools. In the title role, Maureen Beattie takes to the stage and surveys the desolate auditorium. As she stands alone, the camera swings behind her and shares her view of the red velvet seats and ornate balconies. The emptiness is a metaphor for her own isolation.
Even as she is joined by company members, played by amateur actors and fed in, Zoom-style, on large screens behind her, she carries a sense of being alone. The poise and intelligence Beattie has as a performer translates here as self-sufficiency. She is pragmatic enough to be polite, but only one inane comment away from leaving them all behind.
Except, deep down, she knows she can’t do that. What we’ve been missing, observes McKnight, is neither Coward nor Edson, but each other. Despite Black’s urge to be in the spotlight, her real craving is for company. The thought is sentimental but no less true and, as the Whirlers band together to support Black in her darkest moment, touchingly put.
