The cast of this show come from Bablake School, Coventry. The school are also presenting The Bald Prima Donna by Ionesco on alternate days to this, and see them as an absurdist pair. A Resounding Tinkle was written in 1957, but originally as a two-act play. This is the one-act version, considerably different to the two act version. It has dated. All the actors in this production are school leavers. Leah Judge plays Middie Paradock, half of a couple trapped in middle class suburban inanity. Too much of her performance is based on simply making sure that the lines are delivered. She is involved in two telephone conversations but in neither of them does she leave time for the imaginary person on the other end to respond. She does not give herself time to act. Georgi Mosley appears as Uncle Ted , who has had a recent and clearly successful sex change. She does give herself time and then delivers each line as if they had enormous weight and meaning. We are supposed to hang on every line as a great pearl of wisdom. She is not on the stage for long but gets her time in the limelight. The third player is Alex Hoare as Bro Paradock, a man flattened by the dullness of his life. Here we have some subtler acting. He has given more thought to what he is saying and convinces that his character is resigned to the absurdity of his life.There are some odd errors in the staging. In a suburban house you would expect the base of the phone whatnot to be dusted within an inch of its life, not knee deep; it is necessary with old-fashioned phones to lift before dialling and other small things. This points to a wider question. How much does such a young cast understand material that predates their parents? The liturgy of a broadcast church service does remind of the Python that is to follow, but do they know what they are sending up? How informed are they about Gladstone and 1868? Too often it feels as though the answers to those questions are negative. A true performance requires understanding of what you are saying and why. I was left with the question of why this company had chosen to deliver this piece at this time.
