Don’t Rock the Boat
By Robin Hawdon
Directed by Sally Hughes
The Mill at Sonning
Star rating: 3
One of the most harmless little plays I’ve seen in a while, Don’t Rock the Boat isn’t likely to cause many ripples on the Thames where the titular boat is moored – or anywhere else. Nonetheless it’s quite funny, amuses its target audience and isn’t a bad way to spend a couple of hours. It is billed as a comedy and more or less does what it says on the tin.
Two parallel families meet for a mid-90s weekend on a boat which belongs to the Bullheads. Each couple has a daughter and the girls are at school together. Arthur Bullhead (Steven Pinder) is a successful speculative builder hoping to coax favours from John Combes (Harry Gostelow) who is a solicitor in what becomes an ambiguous tussle between the former’s self interest and the latter’s hypocrisy. Along the way there are revelations about the past and fury/embarassment when the girls go off and meet two local lads with whom one thing inevitably leads to another. The dialogue is fast paced and convincing. Then it all peters out at the end as Hawdon apparently runs out of ideas.
All six actors do a reasonable job and are directed well so that they make good use of comic timing and nuance. Pinder excels as the querulous, irritable, smarmy Arthur in a part which could have been written for Nigel Lindsay, but as far as I know wasn’t. And I liked Melanie Gutteridge’s take on his long suffering wife. The social contrasts between the two families are pointed up nicely too.
The real star of this show, though is Jackie Hutson’s set which creates a near full size barge, The Bunty, on The Mill at Sonning’s capacious playing space. It’s attractively detailed with a galley, blinds on the windows, a table which becomes bunk beds, lots of cupboards and even a bird feeder near the door. It’s surrounded by grass to represent the bank and there’s some proper water at the front.
It’s all quite fun but it’s slight.
