Mexborough & Swinton Times – Friday 10 May 1929

The Week’s Shows.
Thurnscoe Amateur Dramatic Society.
” The Creaking Chair”
(Allene Tupper Wilkes).

Angus Holly … Charles Stuart
Sir John Prestwich… Benjamin Heptonstall
Anita Latter… Muriel Minnikin
Esssie Aises…Horace Padgett
Rose Emily Winch…Margaret Clark
Edwin Latter… William Hardy
Sylvia Latter … Ella Lockwood
Mrs. Carruthers … Mabel Hardwick
John Cutting … Francis Brown
Phillip Speed … Frederick C. Brookes
Oliver Hart … Edward Thompson
Henley… William T. Spares
Jim Bates … Maurice Lockwood

(Play produced by William Hardy).

The Thurnscoe Amateur Dramatic Society have acquired a reputation for comedy which is proving a not altogether unmixed blessing to them. Their public—an unusually large and loyal one—expects comedy from them, and, in fact, refuses to accept anything else.

“The Creaking Chair,” which they produced in St. Helen’s School, Thurnscoe, on Monday and Tuesday, is a rather gruesome melodrama with a fair seasoning of humour, and as such the Society presented it; what the audience made of it was something in the nature of a farce, with an occasional thrill to heighten the effect. It was not the fault of the actors, most of whom were tackling work as difficult as any which has yet fallen to their lot; and, after all, perhaps it did not matter very much, for, melodrama or farce, everyone spent a thoroughly enjoyable evening, and the Society had the satisfaction of adding another success to their long list.

There are thirteen characters in “The creaking Chair”:

Edwin Latter, a noted Egyptologist, invalided home from an expedition to the tombs of the East by a knife thrust in the knee, which confines him to a bath chair—”the creaking chair”;

Somewhere in Egypt his associate Carruthers, and considerably nearer home, Carruthers’s wife, suspected of connivance with her husband to rob Latter of some valuable jewels;

Mrs. Carruthers’s Egyptian servant;

Latter’s wife, the passionate, half-tamed little Egyptian girl whom he married to rescue from the hideous tortures of the East, hating everything Eastern, jealous of Mrs. Carruthers;

The dour, tyrannical and devoted butler, Holly, companion in all his master’, wanderings and confederate in most of his master’s secrets;

Rose, the housemaid;

Latter’s daughter Sylvia, who, though engaged to the penniless young journalist, John Cutting is under Mrs. Carruthers’s guidance, rapidly becoming bitten with the craze for mah-jong at stakes far beyond her means;

Cutting himself, and his colleague on the staff of the “Courier,” Philip Speed, come down to interview Mr. latter on the subject of his Eastern adventures. Mrs. Carruthers is found murdered, footsteps are traced from her home to that of Edwin Latter, and into the household at Oakdane, already seething with mystery, enter the “smart” detective, Hart and his underlings.

The play limps a little through the first act, until the crash and lightning of the thunderstorm rolling over the peaceful house (very realistically done) introduces the first hint of the horrors to come. The whole of the action takes place in one room, and is concerned mainly with the efforts of the detective, by bullying, cajolery or sarcasm, to undermine the hysterical hostility of the household and drag into the light the criss-cross clues which one or other can supply; ready to pounce on anything remotely resembling a solution, shifting his ground incontinently as suspicion shifts from one person to another, until everybody in the play (including Hart himself) has been accused of the murder; except the criminal himself, who in Act One disappeared from sight and almost from mind, and returns only during the last few minutes of the play to relieve an almost demented company and provide a surprising, but not altogether convincing, climax.

Most of the cast were old hands, tong accustomed to working together for a harmonious whole. On Monday evening there some fumbling after cues, especially in the later scenes, and an inclination towards inaudibility, due probably to the fact that several of the characters were struggling with foreign dialects.

It is not easy to up a tensely dramatic scene in an unfamiliar language, and Miss Minnikin with her broken English and Mr. Stuart with his Scottish burr did remarkably well. Anita., with her quiet in of passion. and Sylvia younger, brighter, more hysterical—were excellent foils for one another’s acting, and both scored outstanding surceases.

Both Mr. Stuart and Mrs. Hardwick have done better things than their performances in this play, though both were good, while, on the other hand, Mrs. Clark has never before had so much scope as she was given in the character of the terrified Rose. She shared with Henley (Mr. Spaven) most of the comedy of the play. Mr. Spayen, with a comparatively small part, made the utmost of it; and his make-up was excellent. Mr. Thompson did well as the detective, giving us a well-defined portrait of the type of Scotland Yard official which abounds in mystery plays of this kind. Mr. Brookes also was convincing, both as to his professional manner in the first act and his passionate outburst in the third, and Mr. Brown, as the young journalist was entirely adequate. In the minor roles, Mr. Heptonstall, Mr. Padgett and Mr. Lockwood were well cast.