As the new artistic director of Northern Broadsides, Laurie Sansom seems determined to make an impression. Not only has he returned JM Barrie’s Quality Street to Halifax, the town that took the name of this romantic comedy for its famous chocolates, but he’s padded out the play with interview material drawn from chocolate-factory workers whose observations on love and sex feed into a chorus. “She’s a very good actress, isn’t she?” says one about Jessica Baglow in the lead role of Phoebe Throssel (they’re right as well – she’s great).
Sansom goes further: the school scene features puppet pupils, while Jessica Worrall’s costumes go from pretty pastels to dowdy checks before erupting into full-on sweet-wrapper chic, all gaudy purples, oranges and yellows. The ballroom dancing is half disco, half ceilidh.
Chocolates, incidentally, have nothing to do with Barrie’s confection, a West End hit in 1902 but little seen in recent years. Rather, it is a bittersweet love story set at the time of the Napoleonic wars, when a nascent romance between Phoebe and Valentine Brown (Dario Coates) is cut short by the latter enlisting in the army. The pain of missed opportunities and wasted time anticipate Barrie’s Peter Pan. The theatrical disguise when Phoebe pretends to be her younger niece is the missing link between Shakespeare’s comedies of errors and the romcoms of Richard Curtis.
That being the case, it plays well to the audience in a production that refuses to be constrained by the period costumes, favouring quirky cross-casting and boisterous performances (some too boisterous). It soars in the exchanges between Phoebe, Valentine and Phoebe’s sister Susan (Louisa-May Parker), the women endlessly conflicted by what they want and what is expected of them. Baglow, in particular, is bewitching as she switches back and forth between radiant ingenue and world-weary survivor, independently minded even when the odds are against her. This is enough to carry the production, but Barrie’s script can be flabby and the peripheral action, for all its jollity, can seem like a distraction. As with a box of chocolates, you’ll like some scenes more than others.
At the Viaduct theatre, Halifax, until 22 February. Then touring until 13 June.
