Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Barrie Rutter, Emily Butterfield, Darren Kuppan, Jack Quarton, Ben Burman, Elizabeth Eves, Sophie Hatfield, Lauryn Redding, Brett Lee Roberts, Mark Thomas, Russell Richardson.
An August Bank Holiday Lark, the chance for some men to become heroes, for some to find some meaning or importance in life away from the remote villages they may have been raised in all their lives or even the chance to be looked at differently by those they need validation or even respect from. An August Bank Holiday Lark, the hazy days of summer before Gavro Princip took a gun and assassinated one man and his wife and started the ball rolling on the first mechanised whole sale slaughter of soldiers and civilians that tore through Europe and beyond.
For the people that make up the small Lancashire community, war is just what they read in the papers, for there are more important matters to be discussed. Feuds that need reconciling, chickens that need capturing, the traditions of a village that must be maintained for symbolic reasons, and yet war does come to the village and its appetite for destruction knows no bounds and people become less themselves, less human for it.
Northern Broadsides have for many years been able to come to Liverpool and know that what they are placing in front of the audience will be truly understood. An August Bank Holiday Lark is no exception. What is placed before the crowd at the Playhouse Theatre is a production of greatness, punctuated with great traditional dancing and some incredibly excellent acting, notably by Emily Butterfield and Darren Kuppan as the two young sweethearts torn apart by family insistence and the call to arms, Mr. Barrie Rutter as the patriarchal squire of the area John Farrar and Ms. Lauryn Redding as the mill girl who shows the true nature of dejected humanity. At one point she captures the whole misguided notion of war so well that you could hear, out of respect for the dead, a pin drop in the auditorium.
What was chilling, perhaps even alarming, was the intended echoing of the clogs to the sound of on-coming war. The days in which the petty things in life had no place anymore, the small insignificant moments in which make life a joy, destroyed by the actions of one gun in the hands of the wrong man and a continent spoiling to tear itself apart. The frivolity of the serious matters of which dance should be shown to the awaiting townsfolk and chickens eating the neighbours flowers, taken away. It is a lesson that has never been learned.
There will be so many plays commemorating the actions and events of 100 years ago over the next four years, there will be time to reflect upon them all, but it takes the genius of Northern Broadsides, Barrie Rutter, Choreographer Conrad Nelson, an exceptional cast and Deborah McAndrew in which to capture the times that were so easily lost as nations went to war.
With this one play Northern Broadsides showed exactly why they continue to be one of the most ingenious and much loved touring theatres that make their make their way to Liverpool. Consistently superb and breath-taking their originality, An August Bank Holiday Lark is a must see in the run up to the 28th July and a day in which heads might be bowed in silent prayer and anguish.
Ian D. Hall