Review: laughs and tears as the 1950s butts heads with modern times

“Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be”, although it certainly is in ‘Home, I’m Darling’, the latest production from the endlessly-talented Rossendale Players.

The Olivier Award-winning play from Laura Wade is brought to life by regualar Players performer Helena Rose Lockett, this time directing a wonderful cast who had never acted together before.

Home, I’m Darling, as the title suggests, is a devilishly original look at a modern married couple trying to live a quinitissential 1950s lifestyle, out of step with their work and family peers.

Johnny and Judy, played with a wonderfully warm chemistry by Leon Walker and Heather Radler, are the young couple striving for a time that perhaps never existed, an experience that leads inevitably to tension but ultimately to a place where they grow to know and each other better and stronger.

Heather, who made her Players debut in ‘Sheila’s Island’, shines as the uptight, but multi-layered, Judy fighting against her mother’s feminist values.

While the play explores themes of feminism, it would be unfair to label it a purely feminist thome, not least because of the sympathetic male lead of Johnny, played with aplomb by Leon Walker.

Players debutant Sophie Whittaker also deserves special mention for her watertight performance as Fran, friend to the couple, and thoroughly modern counterpoint to Judy.

A Rossendale Players production wouldn’t be complete without stalwart Dawn Rowe, who enjoys some of the most powerful lines of the whole play as Judy’s mother Sylvia, the single-minded world-weary matriarch who remembers a very different side to the 1950s.

Kevin Clarke makes a gloriously smug appearance as the creepy Marcus, perhaps a man who could easily have straddled the 1950s and modern times.

And finally, Helen Nuttall returns to the Players stage as Alex, the very modern businesswoman boss of Johnny, mirror image of Judy, perhaps for good and bad.

As always, special mention must also be paid to the wonderful set at the intimate New Millennium Theatre home of the Players, and the gloriously evocative 1950s soundtrack.

It remains for the audience to see whether inconvenient truths break out from this picture perfect world of 1950s-inspired domestic bliss.

Home, I’m Darling runs until November 14th.