Nothing could be less glamorous or more human. In performing ‘Last Tango in Whitby’, Rosehill Players were intent not on strutting their stuff but on creating character, pathetic, inadequate, like ourselves. They presented a group of unprepossessing pensioners on a ritual outing to Whitby, sustained by Guinness and corny music hall gags: "up and down more often than a bride's nighty", complains Jimmy, as he takes charge of the coach party. Ben Ramsbottom gave his character the quintessence of greyness. It was almost too real.
But out of the greyness came the voice of humanity, quietly, earnestly urging Phil to "look after our Pat", their friend they cared for, and see that she did not get hurt. Pat, recently widowed and still tenderly remembering Arthur who urged her to have a good time even as he was dying in cancer, falls in love with Phil, host of Shangri La at the hotel where they are staying and faces down the censure of puritanical Kathleen. Marian Fox beautifully expressed the longings of a character considerably older than herself, her youth consumed in grey ashes, but her soul still alive to love and passion. She enacted two love stories, one for the younger Phil, the other for her friend, Jessie, whose anguish of screwed up complexes, was movingly expressed by Maria Morton. The most compelling moment in the play came as Jessie sang, rather gauchely and self-consciously but with the voice of true longing, ‘When you are sweet sixteen’, and made contact with the eyes of Pat who knew so well what she meant. It was richly satisfying to hear her finally screw up her courage to tell Vanessa Cowley's domineering Kathleen to stick her friendship, in one of the play’s telling allusions to ‘Last Tango in Paris’, "up her bum." .
The really wonderful thing was that, even though this was a straight play with no mimicking of stars of musicals, they filled the theatre and held their audience, enthralled by the bond actors established with their characters and the humanity of the dramatist, whose dialogue is rooted in the stand up comedy he performed in the clubs of Lancashire and Yorkshire.