Persuasion, Gilroy Theatre at Lyme Regis Marine

IT is strange to think that today’s whooping, selfie-snapping theatre audiences have no idea what “summer rep” was all about. But freelance director and producer Sue Gilroy is determined to prove its value and attraction to new generations with a summer season at Lyme Regis’s historic Marine Theatre.

This year she has chosen five plays and an ensemble of 12 actors to perform them for holidaymakers and local residents. Done in the traditional way – Wednesday to Tuesday so that week-long visitors can see two shows during their stay – they provide that essential rep glue, ownership. If you are lucky enough to live in or near the theatre, you can see the actors playing a wide variety of roles during the season, and then get to have a drink with them in the bar afterwards. Quickly you become invested in “your” actors and “your” company, and then you wait for them to return at Christmas, perhaps, and next summer too. All that makes for a much more involving experience than reading a list of momentary roles in TV soaps in a glossy programme and trying to remember the face.

The 2025 Lyme season started with the thriller Deathtrap, Ayckbourn’s blackly funny A Brief History of Women and Strictly Murder. The fourth show is the almost site-specific Persuasion, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic adapted by Mark Healy. A large chunk of the story is set in Lyme Regis, and this clever version not only introduces the audience to the Elliot family but also to Austen herself, as she wrote her final novel.

Kirsty Cox elegantly takes on the role of the writer and of the ignored middle Elliot sister, Anne, with Victoria Porter producing hilariously energetic characterisations of the interfering Lady Russell, the hypochondriac youngest sister Mary Elliot and the perhaps scheming Mrs Clay. Jodie Glover is the snobbish oldest sister, Elizabeth, Louisa Musgrove and the very rural Mrs Smith. Charlie Coldfield’s Sir Walter Elliot is a masterpiece of superciliousness, and Neil James captures the misery of Captain Wentworth, with Mitch Capaldi as Charles Musgrove, Capt Benwick and the slimy William Elliot.

Directed by Janette Froud, Persuasion is beautifully moved and visualised, using only basic props but evoking the society, manners and hopes of the period.

The final show of the season is Noel Coward’s early three-act comedy Fallen Angels, written when The Master was only 24. It runs at the Marine from 21st to 27th August.

GP-W

Footnote: My spell check does not recognise the word “selfie’, suggesting instead “senile”.

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