The classic portrait of early 20th Century American innocence, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is a poem of naivety that could all too easily slip into cliche. Dripping with southern accents and eulogising a world where honest simplicity and family values are enthroned, on paper the play almost reads as farce and it could prove far too tempting to ham up performances to secure a few cheap laughs. Fortunately the New Wolsey Young Company give us a far more astute reading.

The New Wolsey Studio is an almost perfect setting for an intimate performance of this nature. The Traverse Stage offers a close up perspective of Grover’s Corners that helps to involve the audience in the play, something that is played upon in the performances few metatheatrical moments as the audience are addressed directly and strategically placed actors help to lead the performance on. Simple lighting and just the right amount of supportive sound effects add to the overall picture, whether it be the warming light of the rising sun or the murmuring of a distant train, and this helps to cement Wilder’s microcosm of small town life in place. Again the staging, two tables and a scattering of chairs representing the core of the two central homes, has a simplicity that allows the story to play out in the audience’s minds. You might think the slightness of the story and simplicity of its staging could occasionally dissolve into the monotonous and yet the result is engaging and utterly absorbing.

As always the space of the town is trodden out and described by the play’s narrator, offering both stage directions and asides that build up the texture of the whole town. In his delivery, Harry Smithson offers us a sincere performance that is hard not to warm to, giving us an impression of Wilder’s voice in the play and his love of the town at its heart. Tom Turner twinkles as Dr Gibbs and Josh Overton’s portrayal of Charles Webb is charismatic and genuine. In terms of female leads, Kate Wilson is a piece of perfect casting as the doctor’s concerned and caring wife and Keisha-Paris Banya is excellent as Emily Webb, Mr Webb’s precocious daughter, carrying the wide emotional range of the character with little struggle. There are very few false notes and the cast works together as a cohesive whole.

It is the third act however is really where the performances display the greatest subtlety. Whether it be Wilson’s restrained sadness or Banya’s brittle anguish, the cast excellently handle the frank openness with which Wilder contrasted the contentment of an unremarkable life and the sadness with which these lives close. Here the sentiment that runs through the course of the play, that all too often it is the simple pleasures that human beings fail to appreciate, cuts incredibly close to the bone and gives those watching far more than just a caricature of sweet sentimentality. It’s a difficult pitch to make and is one the cast handle with a great aplomb.

All the way through the play there is a feeling that you are witnessing something genuine, rather than the contrived picture of latter-day Americana with which we have become accustomed to seeing on our television screens. Rather than misappropriate the original work and allow themselves to be swayed by modern misconception, there is a genuine attempt to understand and maintain Wilder’s voice throughout the piece. This is the key divider between this and far more cynical performances: the young actors believe in their roles, something all too often lacking in professional companies.

Overall Our Town isn’t the easiest play to carry off but this performance is evidence that it can be done and done well. It would be an all too easy assessment of this play to view it simply in terms of the age of its proponents. To describe it as ‘a wonderful performance for a group of young actors’ would, in fact, be doing the cast a great injustice. In truth it is simply a wonderful performance.

Words: Josh Russell