Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Paul Duckworth, John Evans, Jane Hogarth, Alan Stocks, Liam Tobin.
No matter how much you are urged to climb every mountain, to put your best foot forward and seize the day, you soon realise that life is far from a walk in the park, and the older you get, the more of an uphill struggle it becomes.
The dreaded team building weekends that companies like to put in place, the forced efforts a group of people given an objective in which to reinforce trust, to make them better players within the corporate structure. All is lost when the circumstances conspire to leave all on the event feeling as if they reliving their worst nightmares, that of the school trip, the sense that if you can be confused and disorientated in middle age and forced to learn new tricks to save your job, then you will enjoy the fresh air of being Lost In Colomendy.
Everyone has their own version of time spent at a retreat or activity centre that became the stuff of legends and nightmares in which the school trip and time away from home has come to represent a rite of passage. Memories of the outward bound a pace and whether you look back with a smile on your face or remember shrinking down under the cold covers and your face obscured lest anyone see your fears as the ghost stories are wielded like swords in battle, then to Liverpool’s own comedy bard should you place trust in reliving the moments with glorious laughter.
Lost In Colomendy is the latest in a long line of comedy succession by Nicky Allt, and with a tremendously superb cast at the helm and with the Royal Court’s traditional flare for hosting a such a giant of a show ensured, then the idea of four old school friends who somehow have managed to keep the thoughts of their time together as empty swimming pools and stolen kisses with the opposite sex arise and now in their later years, work in the gardening section of B & Q whilst eating digestive biscuits and seeing out their days before retirement, the play becomes more of a physical reminder that Time has a beautiful way of reminding you to savour the unpredictable, to allow yourself to give in to youthful temptation at all times.
Whether it is in the act of relishing the sublime bewilderment of Paul Duckworth’s Brian as he hallucinates whilst fighting imaginary Welsh Nationalists, sympathising with Alan Stock’s Barry as he crumbles, then rises, under the pressure of divorce, or knowing someone who loves their stats of every subject in Liam Tobin’s Stan, you cannot ask for more entertainment as they become fluent in dis-orienteering.
A new decade, the same exceptional humour and writing by Nicky Allt, Lost In Colomendy is fully outward looking and completely unbound.
Ian D. Hall