THE CEREMONY (Stream Theatre/Leeds City Varieties Music Hall)**

 

By Cal

Link: https://www.stream.theatre/season/3 £14

Available until: Livestreams on Monday 14^th, Tuesday 15^th, Wednesday 15^th, Thursday 17^th, Friday 18^th, Saturday 19^th and Saturday 20^th December at 7.30pm, with matinées on Thursday and Saturday at 2.30pm.

The Ceremony is the first play written (or at least the first to be performed) by Catherine Tyldesley, who is best-known for playing Eva in Coronation Street and for her performance on Strictly Come Dancing. 

The play focuses on Donna, a successful life coach who decides to hold a séance. The idea seems to be that her guests can contact ghosts and lay their own ghosts to rest at the same time. To begin with, it’s a comedy with fast dialogue and quips. Later, there are some quite emotional moments as the characters reveal the source of their pain.

I think The Ceremony means very well and has a lot of heart and good intentions, but most of the comedy is quite slapstick and childish and some of it maybe isn’t in the very best taste. It does feel like Catherine understands the pace and rhythm of comedy really well - the jokes mostly seem to come at the right moments, but a lot of the time, the jokes slightly miss the mark, at least for me. The emotional moments were more successful for me – they were sympathetically written and quite moving.

I liked the fact that the characters started off as caricatures and then showed more of their real selves because it’s so true to life – much as we might try to avoid it, we do tend to judge and pigeon-hole people when we meet them and it’s only when we talk to them more that we start to get a sense of what they’re really like, so I think the way they changed from caricatures into human beings was realistic.

My favourite thing about the play is how open-minded and open-hearted most of the characters are. Donna has her issues, as so many of us do, but she does want to help people and all the characters want to listen and support the others. That’s a really lovely sentiment which is absent from a lot of written works lately. Not to mention real life.

Stories about illness and family problems are something many people identify with very strongly and Catherine writes these parts of the story well, but I don’t really feel as though the play has anything new to say. I also felt there wasn’t a lot of movement in terms of plot and the one line that really grabbed me and made me excited to know what happened next turned out to be the final line in the play. Well… it’s good to leave your audience wanting more.

It is possible The Ceremony is very clever in a way that doesn’t work for me (which would be down to my intelligence, or lack of, and nothing to do with the writing), but I think there needs to be a bit more to the plot than one revelation after another. However, I do think Catherine has a genuine desire to entertain people and to touch people and that’s really important. This isn’t another soapstar trying to show off. This is a really lovely person with writing talent (much more than some blogger like me!) who wants to say something and wants to share it with us, but hasn’t found the perfect way of doing that yet.

Whatever my feelings about the plot, the cast are excellent. Catherine herself is naturally adorable and this shines through when she plays Donna. I think Donna really needs this quality as some of what she does isn’t exactly admirable, but Catherine’s Donna is very difficult to dislike.

Stephen Rahman-Hughes is equally lovely and very touching as Calish (probably not the right spelling) who isn’t sure where to go next in life. Jodie Prenger is ideal as Donna’s loyal but underappreciated assistant Ada as she switches so easily and naturally from perfect comic timing into her emotional revelation.

Sue Johnston is both funny and moving in her role as an older woman coming to the end of her life (her speech to Calish about his sexuality was lovely). Samantha Giles is best-known as fluffy Bernice in Emmerdale and she’s fluffy in a completely different way here. Paula Lane really knows how to walk in and throw a bombshell.

The play ends with a song which sadly isn’t original, but it’s a great performance from the cast to end what really feels like a work in progress. If it does progress, I’d like to see it again.