PAUL Taylor is still the master after all these years, writes Douglas Roberts.

One of the originals from Tweed Theatre’s foundation Paul continues to act, produce, direct, devise and even become a BBC radio announcer when required.

His latest venture was to direct Sandi Toksvig’s new play, Silver Lining, at the Eastgate Theatre last week.

This was a tough call – the play got poor reviews when it debuted in 2017 – so Paul called in Tweed Theatre’s big guns to play the roles of five elder women trapped on the first floor of their nursing home in Gravesend by rising flood waters. In steps a young care worker tasked with getting the women out to safety and, briefly, an opportunist burglar who is seen off with an unexpected energy that lifts the group’s malaise and their determination to escape by whatever means.

The vivacious Ros Taylor led the charge as Gloria, a no-nonsense, feisty old bird with a mobile phone permanently in one hand, lit-up trainers on her feet and hair startlingly swept up into some sort of sideways mohawk. Foul-mouthed, pragmatic and beyond any sort of youthful social decorum, Gloria stirs up the other residents with feuds, insults and straight talking. Surveying her drab life in the nursing home she says “If I hadn’t given up the booze and fags I’d have missed all this”.

A more layered character is May, a liberal lesbian woman played with vim and compassion by Karen Hamilton, who embodies the tragedy of 20th century gay men and women born before 1960, saying of her loving relationship with the deceased Peggy that they were “fifty years too early”. Her censorious and outwardly religious sister June (a heavily made up Donna Van Der Berghen) attempts to be the group’s moral compass but the weight of her unfulfilled life and secret kleptomania eventually grounds her in a more sinful optimism that there might still be time to enjoy herself before the curtain falls.

Jean Westwater was the constantly distracted Maureen, a dusty thespian forever looking back on a career playing bit parts, walk-ons and extras, who spends much of the play hunting for her missing watch until she finds new purpose in decorating disposable bed pans with ribbons to make hats for the journey out of their waterlogged home.

Anne Taylor played the mysterious character St Michael, so named after the label in the back of her dressing gown. Apparently wheelchair-bound and in advanced stages of dementia, St Michael was found in Room 6, much to the surprise of the other residents who didn’t know she was there. Comatose most of the time, St Michael delivered some of the best lines of the play, a surreal mix of fragmented life memories, scientific data, dirty jokes and a short monologue about her demented state being a relief after a busy life, before suddenly and comically sprinting from her wheelchair to the life raft in the final scene.

Into this unlikely collective steps Hope, played by Paula Blackhall. Hope is a young care worker contracted to organise and ferry the women out of their flooded nursing home to safety. Hope, it seems, is from Alabama, bringing an outsider’s perspective and an opportunity for other characters to explain British culture in comic ways. In the context it might have made more sense if Hope was eastern European, but nevertheless she brings energy and youthful contrast to the elderly company. Her cynicism mellows as she learns the women’s individual stories and she becomes a fellow traveller when they realise they have all been forgotten by the outside world.

The token man in Silver Linings is an opportunist burglar called Jed, played in hapless style by Graham McIntosh. His function in the play is to unite and galvanise the women as they protect their

possessions and violently eject Jed out of the window, giving them a renewed purpose to escape their plight.

The Silver Lining script has a predictable but uneven structure. A wise-cracking first half, sprinkled with just enough swear words, sex toys and poo jokes to qualify as naughty-old-lady content, points to a set of prickly personalities formed from lifetimes of experiences, mistakes, disappointments and fleeting joys. The needle-sharp one-liners and music-hall joke sequences keep this first half alive, although many of the lines bore little direct connection to the emerging personalities of the women. Outside the flood waters are rising and it’s becoming increasingly clear that, in every sense, the women have been forgotten.

The play then moves with a clunky gear-change into a second half of “come on girls, remember who we were in the War” resolve, punctuated with Alan Bennett-style monologues about each woman’s life journey. However the monologues feel artificial and contrived, oddly detached from the play itself. Each monologue dissipated the urgency of escaping, which the cast then struggled to re-establish before the next one started.

The production was classic Tweed Theatre; an over-dressed set, a sold-out auditorium, an anxious stage manager watching from the balcony seats. The sheer dead weight of furniture, props and over-bearing backdrop on the stage needed considerable energy from the cast to overcome. This they achieved at times, but much of the play was static and reliant on the words rather than any obvious stage movement to give it momentum. A slow pace added to the heaviness of the production; the play could have been lighter, brighter and funnier delivered at twice the speed.

This highly experienced director and cast made a word-perfect, spirited and competent performance out of a flawed script. It was over-long, and over-heavy on the stage dressing, but there were laughs throughout from the appreciative audience, plenty of enthusiastic and positive chatter as the crowd filed out, and hopefully another good fee made for our local theatre.

The play’s set-piece ending, the construction of a raft from tables, plastic bottles, strings of bunting and a “Votes For Women” stage prop from Maureen’s lacklustre acting career, was a highlight of the evening. June hurled the plastic water-cooler bottles on to the stage from an unseen flooded room, returning from her swim invigorated and feeling useful for the first time in decades. The women set about clustering the bottles under the table and securing it all together with bunting recently created from one of Maureen’s dresses by a spiteful Gloria. The demented St Michael muttered just enough scientific clues (buoyancy, Archimedes, volume to weight ratios) to guide this endeavour and as the tidal surge reached its peak they all climbed aboard and set sail out the window. Despite the over-long journey to reach it, it was a triumphant crescendo.