‘Entertaining Angels’ by Richard Everett

‘Entertaining Angels’ by Richard Everett
The Guildburys Theatre Company
at The Electric Theatre, Guildford
27th – 30th November 2024

Director: Gilly Fick
Designer: Kim Ferguson
Set construction Lead: Graham Russell-Price
 
Cast:
Grace — Caroline Whillans
Sarah — Sam Remnant
Jo —Amy Kaye
Ruth — Kathryn Attwood
Bardy — Neil James

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Relationships — not simple, but highly entertaining 

It’s relatively rare in my experience to find myself smiling (and at times laughing aloud) from the first moments of a play about loss and grief. But Guildbury Theatre Company’s revival of Richard Everett’s brilliantly written Entertaining Angels, directed by Gilly Fick, proves that it can be done.
 
The play is set in the sunny garden of a village rectory, where we meet Grace, recently widowed and irritated by the presence in the house of her missionary sister Ruth, her psychoanalyst daughter Jo, and Sarah, the next parish incumbent. Grace is chatting on her phone to a friend: acerbic, sarcastic and witty, dealing with the death of Bardy, her husband, with aplomb.  It seems that she will be in control of any situation. But her conversations with her dead husband — and Ruth — swing the plot to darker emotional areas. Sadness and confusion are combined with moments of comedy, as in life and as in all good theatre.
 
Richard Everett, in a Q&A after the performance I attended, described his play as ‘a story about a dysfunctional clerical family’. It works on several levels, exploring sibling rivalries, marital love, betrayals, and communication in family relationships. In the context of a clerical family, religious belief is also in the mix. As the author says, his characters each speak on these issues from their own perspective. Four of the five characters are female, and their views on the ‘gender divide’ are expressed in some trenchant (and often very funny) observations by all four, producing nods of recognition from many in the audience.
 
The cast seems to have developed a symbiosis mirroring the relationships they represent.  Caroline Whillans gave a magnificent performance as the impatient, intelligent middle-aged Grace, suddenly freed to speak her mind after years of duty as a vicar’s wife. In the programme she tells us she loves the character and can identify with her. She brilliantly handled difficult transitions between extreme emotional states. Her delivery of Grace’s emphatic pronouncements was faultless. Kathryn Attwood sympathetically revealed Ruth’s surprising complexities, and Amy Kaye and Sam Remnant, playing Jo and Sarah, each sensitively portrayed the conflicts and vulnerabilities that they have to balance, as they become friends. Neil James’ performance beautifully conveyed Bardy’s own internal conflicts, with masterly understatement.
 
Gilly Fick has achieved a wonderful revival of ‘Entertaining Angels’. The pace and visual appeal of this production were as memorable as the cast’s performances. I’d also like to mention the programme, which is packed with interesting information—including advice on growing fig-trees as part of a note on a biblical reference in the text of the play! We left the theatre feeling as we always hope to feel, that we had been enlightened as well as entertained by this performance.
 
​FIVE STARS
© Janice Dempsey