Melanie McHugh as Elsie

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Pentabus Rural Theatre Company

Here I Belong, by Matt Hartley

Thursday 8th March 2018

Live theatre is special, and to be able to experience high quality professional drama in our local village hall is a privilege to be treasured.  The standing ovation given by the audience at the conclusion of Pentabus’s latest show at Diddlebury Village Hall on Thursday 8th March was testament to that feeling.

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The action in Matt Hartley’s ‘Here I Belong’ takes place entirely in the village hall of the fictional village of Woodside.  There are 4 Acts, set in 1953, 1979, 1998, and finally 2016.  It’s a journey through time with one of the two characters, Elsie, played by Melanie McHugh, being present throughout.  Elsie arrived in the village as a Land Girl in 1943, an incomer from London.  She embraces the village community, who by and large accept her, and as the play proceeds she becomes more and more the guardian and exemplar of the rural virtues of neighbourliness, community, solidarity, self reliance. As time goes on Elsie remains true to these traditional values, at first having to earn acceptance through making  friends and participating in local affairs, and then increasingly defending and explaining them as the next generation moves away to the city, and when, later, young rich adults from the city move into the village. The final Act, set essentially in the present, sees the ninety-year-old Elsie poignantly, almost desperately, trying to find a way of staying in the village with the support of youngsters who can no longer afford to live there.  Her sense of ‘here I belong’, which has nurtured and sustained her for all of her adult life, now leads her to fear isolation or removal.

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Director Sophie Motley chose to present the action in cabaret style, with the audience seated around tables on the floor of the  hall, and the actors moving around them.  This was exciting and involving, but with the disadvantage that not all the dialogue could be heard when actors were facing away from audience members.  Nathalie Barclay’s 1953 character Dorothy wore period shoes that looked terrific but clattered loudly as she moved, masking some of her words.  Some of the stage ‘business’ specified in the script, putting up bunting for the coronation party for example, was difficult to perform quickly, leading to occasional longueurs in the action.  The production is on tour until the end of April and will no doubt iron out these glitches as it proceeds. 

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I found the script challenging.  At times it seemed historically lazy; did some people aspire to be, and others revile, ‘London bankers’, seven years before the ‘Big Bang’ financial deregulation of the mid 80s? Occasionally characters veered dangerously close to caricature; Act 3’s 1998 incomer Scarlett starts off like a cartoonishly insensitive ‘Sloane Ranger’. At other times there is dialogue of authentic sensitivity and genuine emotion: a few lines in Act 1 between Elsie and her best friend Dorothy succinctly summarising the need for children to be allowed to make their own way but be welcomed back if it doesn’t work out; Elsie’s grief at not telling her husband she loved him just before his sudden and unexpected death assuaged simply and movingly by Scarlett repeating “he would have known”.

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Actors Nathalie Barclay and Melanie McHugh gave us contrastingly

versatile performances.  Nathalie Barclay had four very different

characters to play, and played them all with energy and commitment

so that we never for one moment confused one with another.    

Melanie McHugh’s Elsie grew and developed and became

increasingly the focus and centre of the story as the play progressed;

at the end of Act 3 the stage direction says that ‘Elsie ages before

our eyes’.  I don’t know how she managed it but standing feet away

from the audience that is exactly what she did.  These were two

performances of high quality.

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The play became more engaging the longer it went on and for me       

the final Act, set in 2016, felt by far the most authentic and thought                 Nathalie Barclay as Marion 

provoking.  Elsie, the original incomer, finds herself yearning for the

certainties and securities of village life that seem to be abandoning her just when she needs them most.  “I don’t want to leave”, she tells her young carer Katie, but “I’m alone”.  Katie explains why she can’t afford to live in the village where she grew up or carry on travelling there to care for Elsie. Elsie defiantly tells her “the school won’t close”.  “It will if no one with kids can live here”, says Katie.  There was an audible intake of breath in the audience.  By the end we were fully engaged with Elsie’s story; sympathetic to her desire to remain in  the village she’s known all her adult life; appreciative of how she has offered love and understanding to successive generations, and pleased that her friends all rally round at the end to share her 90th birthday party with her in the village hall.

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And she even shared her cake with the audience, and very nice it was too.

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Ian Hankinson