BWW Reviews: AN AUGUST BANK HOLIDAY LARK, Rose Theatre Kingston, June 4 2014

Up on the moors that glower down on Manchester, villages grew around the mills that failed to impress William Blake, but were plenty good enough for the world's first industrialists. Even as late as 1914, many villagers had never seen the sea, never ventured much beyond the Yorkshire border, never dreamt of travelling abroad. That was to change in 1914, when those same industrial processes that drove the looms were applied to warfare and the men who spun yarn by day and danced by night were sent into the machines guns of the Western Front. An August Bank Holiday Lark (continuing at the Rose Theatre, Kingston until 7 June and on tour) is set in one such village - as typical, and unique, as any.

John Farrar (Barrie Rutter) is the Squire, the man in charge of the rushcart - a giant contraption festooned with sections of thatched roof that parades around the village to mark the end of the annual Wakes Week in August. He knows that his daughter Mary (Emily Butterfield) is soon to be a married woman, but he can't quite face it, especially when he learns that her beau is Frank Armitage (Darren Kuppan), very much the man about town - well, man about village. War casts its shadow over the festivities and soon the Squire waves goodbye to his two sons, poetry-loving Edward (Jack Quarton) and, barely a man at all, teenage William (Ben Burman).

Deborah McAndrew's play is full of the joy and space of an English rural festival - there's some splendid dancing, songs sung and played by the multi-talented cast and a lovely sense of space on the Rose Theatre's large stage. But, in the same way that the mills' deadly impact on their workers' health is mentioned just enough to remind us that all was not idyllic, the war creeps ever closer to the villagers' lives. The horrors of the trenches are shown not in the blood and mud of Flanders, but etched into the faces of those left behind to cope.

Rutter is gruff enough to be credible as the archetypal Northern patriarch, but he reveals such men's compassionate side and a devastating pain, unable to find words, when the blow falls. Butterfield is feisty and strong, her character so fully realised that I'm certainly keen to find out what happened to her in peacetime. Best of the rest of the ensemble cast is Lauryn Redding, whose Susie aches for married life, but also seizes her chance for a better job at the mill now the men are absent at war.

This new play has a quiet charm that appeals sufficiently to overcome doubts about its cookie-cutter characters and predictable plot. It demands much of its actors, but less of its audience, and presents its disappearing world as mainly benign, devoid of any class tension. That said, on the horizon, the first signs of female emancipation are clearly visible and there's even a hint of late-flowering love for Rutter. Things may not end happily ever after, but the post-war world would include opportunities the pre-war world never countenanced - and many would be grateful for that.

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