REVIEW: Enjoy, Octagon Theatre, Bolton, Runs until November 2 COULD the sad message of Alan Bennett's Enjoy be that family life in terraced streets - as some of us and our parents knew it - was always destined to become a museum piece?

Worse, was it as good as it is sometimes now cracked up to be?

Dad (Richard Mayes) is revealed as a coarse, unlovable child-abuser with a penchant for pornography.

Linda (Sharon Muircroft), the daughter he abused, becomes a prostitute and his son (Clive Moore) develops into something that Dad cannot accept.

Mam (Elizabeth Kelly), may too have been tainted by life in a Leeds terrace. She, after all, is quite happy to see Dad finally taken from them.

Enjoy is billed as a comedy, and it got its laughs - as well as a curtain call - on the opening night, but it also perhaps challenged the audience's preconceptions of what life was really like in the backstreets of our big cities, and I seemed to detect a certain unease.

Perhaps Enjoy is a heartfelt cry against interfering local-government officialdom that seems to bring all the nastier ways and habits of the characters in focus.

It could be, of course, that Bennett is simply again observing the tragi-comedy of life and leaving us to our own private feelings.

Whatever Bennett's purpose, I enjoyed this production directed by Ian Forrest. The set designed by Richard Foxton was excellent.

Elizabeth Kelly, Auntie Nellie in Eastenders, successfully bridged the North-South Divide. She and the other main characters were all convincing, and it did not matter that none of them seemed to possess a genuine Leeds accent.

Mary Cunningham, as Mrs Clegg, the overbearing neighbour, had a particular feel for Bennett and has shown it before in Talking Heads at the Octagon.

Ken Bradshaw portrayed to perfection all the unpleasant attributes of officialdom gone mad as the man who came to tell the Cravens that their house had been selected for rebuilding as a museum.

Darren Southworth added to his high reputation at the Octagon as Anthony, a neighbourhood yob. He will be remembered as Billy Casper, one of the saving graces of the theatre's production of Kes! The Musical.

DOREEN CROWTHER

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