It Runs in the Family, Marco Players Chorley Old Road Methodist Church. Runs until Saturday. THIS comedy by Ray Cooney requires four doors and a window for its almost-bewildering number of entrances and exits.

At last night's performance, the timing of the frantic action as perfect so far as the audience could tell.

This farce, a hit in the West End, is based, like so many others, on Sir Walter Scott's truism: "O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive".

Alan Macpherson as director/producer and in the lead role of Dr David Mortimore, who is who is amazed to discover 18 years after an affair that he has fathered a boy by Nurse Tate, was largely responsible for the fact that the tangling and untangling of the complicated plot went so smoothly.

The doctors' common room in a hospital is always a good setting for farce with the opportunities it presents for double-meaning and innuendo. By good casting, Marco Players made the most of those opportunities to hilarious effect.

As Dr Hubert Bonney Peter Haslam remind me of Charles Hawtrey of Carry On fame with his ability to express surprise, puzzlement and alarm

His impersonations - to help the deceptions along - of Marlene Dietrich, Al Jolson and Fred Astaire - earned spontaneous and deserved applause. Other characters in the best traditions of English farce were well played by Irene Smith (Rosemary Mortimore), Brenda Cowell (Matron), Robin Thompson (Sir Willoughby Drake), Jack Gill (Jane Tate, the glamour interest), Jason Crompton (Leslie, her punk son), John Nolan (the slow-to-comprehend Police Sergeant - and who could blame him?), Verna Chamberlain (Dr Bonney's dotty mother), and Helen Glaves (Sister).

Bill Langin as Bill, a wheelchair-bound geriatric with a comic ability to misinterpret any situation, was another who made the most of his part in this highly-amusing and delightfully politically-incorrect comedy. DOREEN CROWTHER

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