Culture

Lunchtime Theatre. (4.5/5)

If I was enough of an old fart to remember the Fifties, I’m sure A Dream Romance would paint the perfect picture. Blonde, gum-chewing bimbos, leather jacket wearing, combing-toting sleazy guys and, if Grease and High School Musical got anything right, teenagers randomly bursting into song.
 
Upon entering the theatre we were attacked by three delightful young women, having our heart-shaped tickets broken before our very eyes, and then before the play could properly begin, two of them proceeded to scream “Stop harassing that man!” at each other across the seats. We then settled down to watch our narrator - a novelist - begin to write “A Dream Romance”.
 
The following forty minutes were full of acting talent, heavy with sexual innuendo and made memorable by a variety of catchy tunes, the singing accompanied live on stage by a pianist. The songs created nostalgia, even though most of us would been born decades later, and provided good laughs at Spencer, the ‘hunk’ of play, and his possessive attitude to Dee-Dee, claiming that now she would do what he wanted, there was nothing to do but be happy.
 
Supporting characters, namely ‘the office girls’, injected most of the innuendo into the play. A whole song dedicated to guacamole, orgasm jokes - “I think I can hear him coming” “You must have really good ears then!” - and cries of “SPENCER DAVIES! Uhhh!” every time his name was mentioned drew the majority of the laughs from the audience.
 
Sally Andrews’ directing in this piece was top notch. Players moved smoothly from the stage to the floor, creating scenes from the office, the bathroom and Spencer’s bedroom (oh-la-la) with very little use of complicated sets. The costuming in A Dream Romance was also superb, Spencer looking like he’d been picked straight out of the chorus of “grease-lighting”, and Dee-Dee transforming from the blue, polka-dotted princess into the sexy, slim black-laced seductress. The lighting, though simple, was effective, setting the right mood for the scene in Spencer’s bedroom, spotlighting two of the office girls as they “shoo-be-doo-wah”-ed their way through the seats and drawing attention away from the narrating novelist to Dee-Dee following each word she ‘types’.
 
The play ended with a nice twist, showing the stark contrast between the Fifties way of life and now. Characters on the dole, single mothers, multiple failed marriages; what better way is there to describe the ‘modern gal’ in the twenty-first century? Except for the odd slip from the preppy, fake American accents, it’s hard to find fault in A Dream Romance.