Theatre / “Book of the Month”, Tempo Theatre. At Belconnen Community Theatre until June 3. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

TEMPO Theatre director Jon Elphick has momentarily abandoned Agatha Christie in staging an English comedy, “Book of the Month”, instead of his usual classic murder-mystery, but he has certainly not abandoned the 1950s.

This entertaining production of a 1958 play by Basil Thomas is set firmly during the era of what the late Barry Humphries would have called “niceness” in the stiflingly dull home of a lazy minor British MP whose shy daughter has written a bodice-ripper ripper of a novel.
Eighteen-year-old Betty is treated as a child by her father Edward Halliday MP (Kim Wilson) and mother, (Rina Onorato) so when the novel is picked up by a publisher and made “Book of the Month”, her family go into shock and what follows is of the “what could possibly go wrong?” variety.

Of note is that the play was later turned into a film by Gerald Thomas, director of all the “Carry On” films.

But Basil Thomas, ostensibly writing a straight British comedy of manners, was in fact well ahead of his time, and in the second half of Act I, he plunges us into the pages of Betty’s book, titled (after Walt Whitman) “Bare Bosom’d Night” as the characters, thinly-veiled caricatures of her nearest and dearest, overact through all the cliches of adultery, alcoholism and drug-taking.
This proves a gift for Elphick’s cast, meaning that each actor has two roles, the ordinary one and the exaggerated version of a more humdrum existence and they all make a meal of it.

Sarah Jackson as Betty makes an effective transition from teenage recluse to femme fatale in the play within a play as she steers around her handsome but indifferently-talented young journalist neighbour Nicholas (Ryder Gavin).

Chris McGrane almost steals the show with his joyous stage-Scottish presence when he changes from respectable teetotal physician to alcoholic lecher.

Debra Byrne as maiden aunt Marcia veers between spinster and sex-goddess but has her best moment when, instead of being horrified by the libidinous subject matter of Betty’s novel, is shocked by a split infinitive.

To complete the rogues’ galley, Anna Hemming as seemingly complaint maid Doris and Tempo newcomer Paul Cowan as the blustering Colonel Barnes-Bradley serve to  point up the hypocrisy of the other characters.

Elphick’s brightly-coloured set is attractive but sufficiently odd to give us the sense, as the script demands, of a Georgian mansion redecorated in bad taste.

This is an affectionate production of a well-written comedy; I only wish the pace could have been a bit faster.