Trivial Pursuits

A summer evening's barbecue is the setting for a meeting of the Trealaw and District Operatic Society. Next season's play is to be announced but Nick, the society's business manager, has promised a different show and the plum roles to four different people. As the evening progresses each character's foibles and talents are revealed: Joyce, once talented and well meaning, is a lush; Teddy is alternately sweet and strident; Derek is pathetic but lovable. The complex relationships between players emerge as moments of pure slapstick and farce alternate with ones full of real drama and pathos. Not every hitch is resolved, but at the end of this exploration, by turns ironic and serious, of the joys and heartaches of amateur theatrics, the society is intact and its members ready for another season of testing the magic and artifice that is theatre.