Co-operative Hall, Market Harborough

'Market Harborough Co-operative Drama Club presented two plays at the Co-operative Hall on Wednesday evening. The first was Bernard Shaw’s The Inca of Perusalem (described as a comedietta), and the second was Women at Sea (attributed to no one in particular). The players were Barbara Budworth, Phyllis Hart, Joan Hart, Doreen Pickering, Pamela Ashley, Geoffrey Heighton, Sylvia Williams, Doris Gotch and June Hazeldine. With Mr. Harold Jones producing. the Club (chiefly young people) have made a noteworthy advance in standard, and Joan Hart was outstandingly funny in the second piece. The two plays will be given again on Saturday evening’. Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail, Friday 26 November 1948 (with a photograph of the casts of the two plays).

The Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail, 3 February 1950, advertised the Apollo Players in Shaw’s The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (preceded by Lorca’s farce The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife) at the Co-operative Hall, Market Harborough, on 16-18 February 1950. ‘The brilliant colour of sunny Spain and the drab, dirty ‘color’ of a shanty colony in the bad old Wild West were the highlights of a programme of two contrasting plays at the Co-operative Hall, Market Harborough last week … The second play is a crude melodrama by Bernard Shaw, “The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet.” Both present the familiar Apollo Players in an unfamiliar setting. Particularly surprising is the Shaw play, in which they struggle gamely, but not always successfully, with the “highfalutin” drawl of the Arizona bad-men. Bernard Page, as a thick- skinned sheriff, Howard Biddlestone, a downright rotten sort of a guy, and Isabel Peake, a cow-puncher’s “hang-around saloon” moll, are in themselves a worthwhile experience. But there should be more to the play than that. It is a powerful melodrama, preaching in the most vigorous and audacious Shaw vein, but in their portrayal the players are not powerful enough and the play loses some weight and merit. The danger the players are up against is that the amusement. caused by their appearing in wild west garb, detracts from the serious aspect of a play which was originally banned because it seriously offended the religious scruples of the day. The players and the producer, Mr. Harold Jones, are to be congratulated for tackling it and in handing out the meat of Shaw’s sermon, but they lack the gravy to bring out its full flavour' (Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail, 24 February 1950).