Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Maggie Fox, Sue Ryding.

There are always seems to be a sense of the mystical allure when you meet a writer that arguably no other profession can carry, people don’t tend to meet someone at a party who gets up at four o’ clock in the morning and spends a whole day on a farm and has to deal with government interference about quotas and crop rotation, by saying to them, I have always wanted the romance of own animals in my life. Yet there always is a yearning to tell a writer that you have always wanted to be one. Not realising that the act of writing itself is in fact the closest occupation that mimics life and death.

It is the fact that you don’t really control your characters either, the writer believes they have sole domain over the actions of those they have employed under the banner of the story, the heroic and the bland, the central attraction and the plot devices alike, they want the struggle of finding their own way to the top of the literary memory chain and nothing can stop the writer from feeling left out of the process as they realise that their own creation is mad, that Mr Darcy Loses The Plot.

Lip Service Theatre are beloved by Liverpool audiences, there is always something uniquely funny about the two ladies who dominate the stage with their wonderfully embroidered tales, their withering looks and their absolute dedication to bringing laughter out for a joyous ride wherever they go.

For Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding, Lip Service is not what they offer the Unity Theatre audiences, instead what they do is full on and bountiful and in their latest adventurous setting inside the mind of a Mr. Darcy who has his own agenda when being written about, who wants to see the world beyond his own literary castle, the plot is everything you could want or expect from two astounding comedic actors of the stage.

What the actors/writers provide is the arguable truth of the art form, that it is not the writer in charge of the story but the characters to whom everything hangs, nothing is ever truly the way it can be imagined, nothing is ever set from conception to finally writing the end as the last page homes into view and as Mr Darcy Loses The Plot so too does the writer rejoice and the audience enjoy the sound of absolute laughter, a pure and hopeful sound which is not craven or resounding in cruelty, but a heartbeat, one in which the plot hits home perfectly.

More than a great evening provided by Lip Service Theatre, this is the stuff of comedy gold.

Ian D. Hall