Downstairs, in Fenton city corridor’s cute cafe, native theatregoers spot me as an out-of-towner and start talking of their area’s as soon as superb previous, from its potteries to its literary godfather in Arnold Bennett, earlier than getting on to Brexit and this nook of Stoke-on-Trent, which, they are saying, has been so badly “left behind”.
Upstairs, Bennett’s long-gone world of wealth, upward-mobility and alternative, dropped at life on the corridor’s good-looking ballroom, provides their phrases poignancy. The drama options the fictional city of Bursley in Nineteenth-century Stoke and its protagonist is the incorrigible Denry Machin, a left-behind of the Victorian period at first and humble son of a washerwoman.
Besides that this wily upstart discovers his expertise for monetary opportunism to duck and dive his method from rags to riches. Bennett’s usually twisty story of aspiration and social mobility is customized by Deborah McAndrew and directed by Conrad Nelson with such wit and ingenuity that it trumps even the roguish appeal of the 1952 movie of Bennett’s novel that includes Alec Guinness.
Denry (Gareth Cassidy) rapidly rises from lowly clerk to the city’s youngest mayor after a sequence of madcap money-making schemes. He's the consummate capitalist entrepreneur who makes his wealth from totally different types of hire gathering and cash lending – a benign model of Dickens’ Scrooge – though the sharper, extra self-serving edges of Bennett’s authentic story have been shaved away to render him a “enjoyable” sort of Tory right here.
Cassidy’s is a much more picaresque determine than Guinness’s Denry (his accent matches higher than Guinness’s RP, too) and he performs his half with heavy helpings of cheeky-chappie bonhomie.
Better of all is the large, vivid sound of a brass band (led by Jef Sparkes), which brings a lump to the throat from the minute its gamers march into the corridor. There's delicate tune, dance and twinkling meta-moments alongside the comedy, with a kazoo-like sound from a brass instrument for comedian impact, and an exciting quantity wherein a typewriter is “performed” alongside the band.
Actors from the Claybody Group Firm play violins, flutes and sing liltingly, in addition to doubling up of their elements, enacting scenes in addition to changing into narrators.
Jessica Dyas is especially profitable because the tartly aspirational Ruth, whereas Denry’s mom is performed by the burly, bearded Howard Chadwick, in a scarf and bonnet, with all of the growly appeal of Steve Pemberton in his League of Gents days.
Daybreak Allsopp’s set is mild and gestural and the manufacturing emanates each mischief and stateliness, by no means too frantic regardless of the plot turns and quick bodily scenes, with a full and fluid use of the lengthy traverse ballroom house. Allsopp’s costumes are understated however stunning: the lads in tails on the opening ball, the ladies in pale-blue attire whose shades are repeated within the band’s colors.
The comedy generally appears too cartoonish, the characters flat, however they develop to change into touching. There's a timeless magnificence to all of it and it's oddly shifting by the top, regardless of the understanding winks and meta moments. This may simply be leisure for audiences of greater than a century in the past or equally for now, and represents the most effective of group theatre.
The Card is at Fenton city corridor, Stoke-on-Trent, till 9 July.
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