Described by its author as a ‘fable’, Country Magic (adapted from Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Enchanted Cottage, 1922) is the tale of a maimed veteran Oliver Bashforth, who despairingly embarks upon a loveless marriage to unprepossessing country-girl Laura. Pinero’s tragi-comic landscape is a pastoral idyll populated by the walking wounded of the first world war: the blind, the lame, the scarred and the shellshocked all dreaming of miraculous healing.
Phil Willmott’s production is bedevilled by some ill-advised spatial design, necessitating much shuffling around bits of the set, and the shallow playing-space makes keeping a crucial secret in the bag for any length of time a pretty forlorn hope. Period costume for a company of ten also seems at times to stretch the budget to breaking point, but the cast beautifully capture the emotional realities underlying the play’s sentimental absurdities.
Moir Leslie imbues the well-meaning sallies of Bashforth’s fashionable mother with briskness, foolishness and dash. Sarah Feathers gives a charmingly pitched performance as the finitely sweet-tempered wife of a country curate, nobly supported by genial Paul Critoph as her ineffectually affable spouse. As Oliver and Laura, Daniel Abelson and Victoria Gee negotiate the thorny proposition scene with touchingly pensive, hurt honesty. And among Pinero’s roll-call of war casualties, Jamie Hinde brings discreet showmanship to the role of sightless Hillgrove, Lachlan Nieboer’s Rigg makes an unexpectedly powerful curtain-speech, and Nicola Wright’s tight-lipped housekeeper finally breaks her silence to reveal a hard-won, healing wisdom.
If some of the running jokes are wearing lead boots (was Bognor funnier a hundred years ago?) the sentimental core of the drama has kept its poignant freshness and power. A small flurry of wiped eyes at the curtain call bears testimony to Pinero’s grasp of the foolishly hopeful human heart. An old-fashioned confection of kindly wish-fulfilment, Country Magic nevertheless appeals to the enduring desire that small miracles might somewhere, and somehow, occur.
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