Last of the Summer Wine

THE Cosmopolitan Players in Leeds renowned since the early 1980s for putting on comedy plays and popular titles have chosen one of the most popular BBC series for their spring production. Roy Clarke’s Last of the Summer Wine ran as a TV series from November 1973 to August 2010 making it the longest-running comedy programme in Britain and the longest-running sitcom in the world.

In this new stage adaptation, Foggy, Clegg and Compo are reunited for one last adventure. Foggy has designs on winning the affections of Constance, Nora Batty’s niece and the long-suffering fiancée of the hapless Gifford Bewmont. With the help of Clegg, Foggy invites the ladies around for an evening’s entertainment but the duo are unaware that a mysterious flasher is stalking the local community. Gifford, a special constable, has pledged to apprehend the flasher and has mounted all-night patrols in the village. While awaiting the arrival of the ladies, Foggy is dismayed when Compo turns up unannounced and proceeds to wreak havoc on Foggy’s careful preparations as Hifford’s efforts to capture the flasher lead to mistaken identities and even more chaos. When the flasher is eventually unmasked it turns out his intentions are benign, but not before our heroes are nearly undone by the enveloping madness.

I was impressed by the opening sequence of the play with a short video filmed in Holmfirth (the setting for the TV series) by Bryan Craven with the three main characters of Foggy (Michael Wilkinson), Clegg (Graham Siddle) and Compo (Terry Kelly) walking up one of the cobbled streets and shown on the large screen at the front of the stage. The curtain then lifted to reveal Clegg’s dining room where the action of the play itself takes place.

There are a total of seven actors in the production. As well as the three mentioned above, Richard Hunt plays Gifford, Lee Sharrat is Flash, local journalist Liz Coggins performs the role of Nora Batty whilst Gillian Myers is Constance.

As befits a piece of writing from Roy Clarke, there is much humour in the storyline and this is well brought out by the three main characters with much slapstick including in particular Compo and Flash hiding under the dining table. I thought these three actors worked very well together much in the same mould as Brian Wilde, Peter Sallis and Bill Owen.

They were very well supported by Richard, Lee, Liz and Gillian whose contributions combined to make this a very enjoyable evening for the audience at The Carriageworks. It is just a pity that the theatre was only 50% full on the opening night, and I hope it picked up for the remainder of the week.

by John Burland