REVIEW:

Whiskey Galore, Salisbury Playhouse, Tuesday, June 26

I had a problem. Whisky Galore had received lots of naff reviews and, frankly, I wasn’t looking forward to reviewing it. Confusing, they said. A play-within-a-play, too many characters, pointlessly re-set to the 1950’s. Oh dear. “Just tell it how you see it, never mind what anyone else thinks,” said Sagacious Spouse. And wives know best, so here goes.

So, to start with, they’d clearly taken the criticisms on board and, frankly, it wasn’t really all that bad. The play-within-a-play bit, in honour of a little-known troupe of female actors called the Palla Players (this was itself an all-female cast) was minimal – a couple of jokey “lights down, action” moments at the start of each half, but that’s about it. Lots of characters, certainly, but easy enough to follow, and correctly set in 1943, so all was tickety-boo.

Yet problems remained. The first act set the scene: two burgeoning romances and, of course, a “dram drought” on Great and Little Todday, making everyone tetchy. Simple, really, so no need to go over it time and again during a first half which meandered along at a wearyingly sober pace.

Come the second half, though, the whisky arrived and things picked up! As ye’ll ken, the islanders set about liberating thousands of bottles of the golden nectar from the wreck of the SS Minister. Characters blossomed, clichéd and overplayed for comic effect: a “jobsworth” local “bobby” and HM’s Excise Inspector, both desperate not to find any contraband, and a vampish spinster out to ensnare the local GP - classic Ealing Comedy types done “just so.” At last, a few good laughs – nothing profound, just decent midweek entertainment.

And, of course, they all lived happily, if a little hazily, ever after, making the play a paean to the therapeutic powers of whisky. At least, that’s how I saw it. Slangevar!

By Chris Parkinson-Brown.