This imag­i­na­tive ver­sion of the city mouse/​country mouse fable has a seem­ing­ly more sophis­ti­cat­ed farmer rook­ing in his more inno­cent neigh­bour into par­tic­i­pat­ing in an ill-con­ceived remake of Wood­stock on his par­ents’ farm. Bob, the feck­less son of corn farm­ers, agrees, hop­ing to keep the farm going. This play suc­ceeds well enough to be one of the final­ists for the Har­ry Rin­toul Award, no mean feat in a year with a bumper crop of great local­ly writ­ten plays (sor­ry about that pun; couldn’t resist).

Chelsey Gre­war wrote this play and por­trays mul­ti­ple char­ac­ters. Matthew Paris-Irvine plays the inno­cent but game Bob. The pro­duc­tion I saw on the final Fri­day scored big with a large audi­ence. I sus­pect that I might be a bit too old for the play to have max­i­mum effect, or per­haps I was a bit tired after see­ing too many oth­er shows, but I wasn’t swept along. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t think Grewar’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tions were sharp enough, and the pace seemed a bit slow for the mate­r­i­al. It’s entire­ly pos­si­ble, though, that I missed some clues along the way.

Venue 2 — MTC Up the Alley

Play Com­e­dy

60 Min­utes

Parental Guid­ance

Warn­ings: Coarse lan­guage, sex­u­al content