Dangerous CornerA gunshot sounds offstage; a female voice shouts from the same direction: ‘It can’t happen! It shan’t happen!’
A man’s voice from voice calls from the audience: ‘Well, it already has happened!’
The moment reminded me of Dickens writing about a staging of ‘Hamlet’, when someone from the stalls shouted at the Prince, ‘Oh, for goodness sake, make your mind up!
As an ex-amateur trouper myself I’m biased, but there’s a lot of charm about amateur productions, apart from impromptu audience participation: they usually put on out-of-copyright plays which have proved their success over the years, you don’t have to travel far and the price of tickets, refreshments and programmes are a fraction of what you pay in the West End.I hadn’t seen JB Priestley’s Dangerous Corner before, so I gasped with the rest at the plot twists in this otherwise rather static thriller. Three company directors and wives in the 1930s are gathered for dinner, a year after the brother of one of them has committed suicide. As the evening progresses dark secrets emerge - a bit like one of those ocasional episodes of Eastenders where the protagonists go in for a bout of clearing the air. In this case we, the audience, are just as surprised as the characters.
If it sounds familiar it’s because it has a lot in common with An Inspector Calls, although revelations in the better-known play are provoked by an outside agent – the eponymous Inspector. He questions a factory owner and family members about the grisly suicide of a former employee. In a series of startling twists every member of the ‘respectable’ family assembled for a family celebration is implicated in the death.
Bradford-born Priestley took on a kind of Daily Telegraph role in 1930s, although his characters were fictional. He thought society’s values were being destroyed by the greed of small-scale capitalists. The rest of the audience was as enthralled as I was at an amateur production by The Alaxander Players at Charlton, SE17.
They say in London you’re never more than twenty feet from a rat. It seems you’re never very far from a local dramatic society either, although I wasn’t aware of the Charlton company until I saw a leaflet at the local library.I think the Alexandra Players are one of the best amateur companies I’ve seen. Set, costumes, directing and acting were of a uniformly high standard, and I’m looking forward to their next play. This may well be a pantomime, for which, apparently, they are celebrated locally. They more than deserve their supportive audience, even if some members feel relaxed enough to comment on the drama as it happens.
