AS I write this, I have no idea whether the planned production of Claire Dowie’s late 1990s double bill of All Over Lovely and Easy Access (for the boys) will be going ahead at The Exchange at Sturminster Newton tonight and tomorrow. If it does, the audience is in for a brilliantly performed and deeply uncomfortable evening. If not, fingers crossed that it will be re-scheduled in a cooler time and a smaller auditorium. These plays will never get sell-out audiences in the biggest auditorium in Stur.

The playwright is a remarkable artist. Now 68, she began her career as a dancer, moving into stand-up comedy before her playwriting developed. She “invented” the stand-up theatre genre, concentrating on issues of sexual identity and abuse, performed in the “InYerFace” style that evolved as homosexual became gay became LGB, then added a T, and a Q and goodness knows what else … even as a gay woman, I just can’t keep up.

Locally based actor and director Nicole Forbes-Marshall saw a revival of the plays, and was determined to bring them to rural Dorset. She gathered a cast of actors willing and able to bring these difficult plays to an audience drawn from friends and members of the community and began the process of production of the also difficult spaces of The Exchange. All Over Lovely is performed in a three-room hotel suite in front of the wide stage, and the set is transformed for the second play to include a fully decorated cafe and small bedroom on the stage, and a living room, street and bedroom in front.

In addition to all of these complicated settings, there are four screens on which various film is shown during the performances. It is immensely complicated and expensive, for amateur groups to try for the sort of tech that professional theatres can produce – and here, probably just too demanding. Not only the cueing but the intercutting complexity proved too much for the beleaguered tech director, and the result was to slow the action.

Briefly, All Over Lovely is performed by Nicole Forbes-Marshall and Sarah Collins, and co directed by Toby Greenfield. It is about sibling rivalry, parental abandonment, lesbian love, political activism, the rise of homosexual freedoms, ecological fervour and the impossibility of escape from our familial past.

Easy Access (for the boys) is about child sexual abuse and its indelible imprint on adult life. It centres around rent-boy Michael and his relationship with his father Ed, both played with charismatic understanding by George Lipop and Freddie Wopat. The painful inevitability of this harrowing play brings out extraordinary depths from the cast, which includes Martyn Lilley as the confused lover, Matt Rawson as the friend and Hazel Perret as a young mother drawn into a hideous situation.

Both plays are too long – they don’t need the endless repetition. We get it.

I hope you get to see a much simplified version of these two productions. So much work and time has gone into the preparation it would be sad if it were lost. It is another example of the depth and scope of Sturminster Newton Amateur Dramatic Society, aka SNADS.

GP-W