No Kidding and
A Logic Named Joe
Twyford and Ruscombe Theatre Group’s radio plays
Until July 20
twyrusdrama.org.uk
Legendary BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke once said: “I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better”.
The amazing power of the spoken word alone is being demonstrated again by the enterprising Twyford and Ruscombe Theatre Group.
Their two fresh “radio plays” are available to listen to online from today until July 20.
The group has been staging radio plays, rehearsed and recorded online, to keep performing during Covid-19.
Sound man David Goddard, who edits the recordings and adds sound effects and other refinements,
deserves huge applause for his key contributions.
No Kidding written by Jean Trew and directed by Beth Reynolds sweeps listeners into the comedy and conflicts of a large goat being on the loose.
Tammy Tanqueray and Mike Higgins make fine work of wife and husband Barbara and David bungling round their long-established relationship.
Mike Brooks’s supermarket manager and Hazel Evans’s shop assistant take us vividly into the chaotic scene created for listeners.
Emma Cianchi and Marc Reid, as the animal rescuers, portray measured professionalism when all else is pandemonium.
Sally Castle did well with two contrasting characters, the radio operator and the TV anchor.
Lucy Wright as Charlie is wonderfully involved with her distracting earphones. Jo Davies as Carol the goat keeper creates an authentic relationship with her friend Barbara.
The other play is apt for Twyford, inhabited as it is by so many IT workers. A Logic Named Joe by Murray Leinster is about a logic computer named Joe, and a man, Frank, who saves civilisation.
Written for radio in 1950, it is surprisingly contemporary on how machines could take control.
With Mike Brooks directing and a large cast, the story moves along at a pace. Set in the US, the cast tackles American accents well.
Marilyn McClelland and Beth Reynolds give powerful performances opening the play. Beth returns later to play the bartender.
Frank Kaye takes the lead, as computer serviceman Frank Caldwell, with confidence, drawing the audience through the story.
READ MORE: Radio dramas from Twyford theatre group
Ian Mcdonald playing his boss and Richard Rudman as the customer set the story going well. Emma Cianchi is enticing but forboding as the boss’s wife. Isobel Buck makes an excellent obnoxious little boy.
Hazel Evans as the voice of Logic, the play’s equivalent of today’s virtual assistant Alexa, is convincingly mechanistic and slightly sinister.
David Tanqueray, Mike Higgins and Ian Mcdonald do good work as Frank’s card game friends.
I enjoyed the interaction between David Tanqueray playing a drunk and Lucy Wright, playing his wife. There were good performances by Marc Reid as the Sergeant of Police, Sally Castle as the dizzy southern Belle and Jane Rhodes as Frank’s wife.
For tickets visit this link: www.ticketsource.co.uk/twyrusdrama
The cost for each person to listen is £3. The group welcomes donations to help them build a scenery storage space at Loddon Hall, Twyford.
SUE CORCORAN
