• Home
  • Our Next Show
  • News
  • Past Shows
  • Reviews
  • Audience Reviews
    • You Review – The Sound of Music
    • You Review… The Steamie
    • You Review… Peter Pan
    • You Review… Beauty & The Beast
  • Show Galleries
  • Show Footage
    • Beauty & The Beast Additional Footage
  • Contact Us

Eyemouth Variety Group

You are here: Home / Reviews / Arsenic & Old Lace – Berwickshire News

Arsenic & Old Lace – Berwickshire News

January 24, 2015 By intimation

Eyemouth Variety Group got away with murder – many times over – this week in the most genteel of ways with their production of Arsenic and Old Lace.

The show was carried with real grace and an acid wit by the two stars, Christine Henderson and Maureen Gillie, who played the murderous Brewster sisters, Martha and Abby, the original ‘lady killers’.

The pair toed the fine line between murder and nurture as they devoted themselves to escorting their “gentleman” lodgers off this mortal coil .

You may have thought nobody could act like Cary Grant – the man himself said he didn’t even know how he did it – but Steve Sadler gave it a good shot as the ladies’ favourite nephew, Mortimer, played by Grant in the film version.

Andrea Thacker as love interest Elaine Harper took to the American accent with the most ease, and was a good foil to the increasingly bewildered Mortimer.

Young Jack Ritchie was always on hand to provide some chaos as Teddy Brewster, who believed he was president Teddy Roosevelt, charging into battle every time he went upstairs and whose ‘Panama Canal’ digging in the basement provides his maiden aunts with their graves.

It wasn’t all homespun homicide, though – the police did get involved. Even if that meant Officer O’Hara (Bill Shardlow) detailing his planned autobiographical play all night. Brophy, Klein and Lieutenant Rooney (Jim Watt, Kenny Combe and Raymond Williams, who also doubled as Dr Harper) meanwhile, only caught one out of four murderers, and ignored the bodies in the cellar through disbelief.

Menace was supplied in spadefuls by Jonathon Combe as the psychotic Jonathan Brewster and his sidekick Dr Einstein (not that one!) played by Craig Rosie.

The weird sisters kept us laughing in the dark all the way to the end, even conspiring to ‘help’ the manager of the asylum that Teddy had been sent to.

The final glimpse the audience got of them, serving their spiked drinks once more, this time to Mr Witherspoon, played by Rory Fairbairn, was priceless.

Producers Pauline Grieve and Gilly Peakman kept the action tight and the script rattled along, leaving the audience perversely wishing that we might get to spend just a little more time in the Brewsters’ house and its fine cellar.

Read the review on the Berwickshire News

Filed Under: Reviews

Join Us

Our group is always pleased to welcome new members either in the show on the stage or backstage work. Everyone is welcome no matter what your talent & ability. We meet Thursdays September to … Read more...

EVG Links

  • Amateur Stage Magazine
  • NODA
  • NODA Scotland
  • The Border Studio
  • Utopia Costumes

Story Archive

On Twitter…

  • Check out the character profiles on the EVG Facebook page: http://t.co/3z4jGIPvsX #arsenicandoldlace #theatre #comedy January 8, 2015 1:40 pm
  • Sweep away the January blues with EVG’s production of Arsenic and Old Lace, 15th & 16th Jan at 7.30pm Old High School Hall. #theatre #comedy January 8, 2015 1:38 pm
  • This years pantomime will be 'Robin Hood and Babes in the Wood'! Tickets are on sale now at Occasions Eyemouth, £9 adult,£7 child!! October 16, 2014 11:29 am
  • Follow us on Twitter

[footer_backtotop]

Copyright © 2022 Eyemouth Variety Group