Glamour at the Nottingham Playhouse

I watched the play Glamour and this is my view.The play takes an episode from Stephen Lowe's Nottingham as a youth as its starting point. The schoolboy Lowe was working at a small Nottingham cinema, the Moulin Rouge, where his tasks included booking foreign films, which were cheaper than new releases. "The continent" - especially Paris - came to embody the idea of romance, sex and glamour. The young Stephen Lowe, represented by Jimmy Potter (not Porter) in the play, decided on a career as a film-maker. Undeterred by his reliance on a handheld 8mm camera, he settled on his first project: a short blue movie (literally blue since he dyed the film in the bath).

The play, which takes place behind the screen at the now-lost Moulin Rouge. Six actors are on stage. There's the young would-be film-maker and his girlfriend, who are torn between his desire for art, sexual experience and Lawrentian ideals and her Catholic upbringing (coupled with embarrassment about her small breasts). There's the chirpy, comic cinema-owner who has fled to Nottingham from London and his alluring, uneasy wife. There's the would-be singer who offers a different kind of glamour - he once appeared on Top of the Pops. And there's a quiet Irishman, working on a building site while writing poetry and talking of Joycean epiphanies. Off-stage - in the streets and the auditorium of the cinema we never see - are guests invited to the premiere of young Jimmy's film and a group of Irish building workers.

The play is a comedy but, as with all good comedies, there's loss at the heart of it. Almost all the characters yearn for a life that's unattainable and dream of being somewhere else, where life is filled with glamour .The older characters are more seduced by glamour than the young who still have the chance that luck will improve their lives - perhaps their greater chance of luck means the young can afford their forays into realism.

I thought the cast very good.Especially Tanya Myers as Connie, Michael Socha as the young Jimmy Potter and Leicesters own Melissa Simpson as his girlfriend.The play as a whole was a delight: lots of laughs but, in the end, real emotion and a sense that the play had raised important questions, as good plays do.There were also delightful and embarrassing recollections of the 1960s.