A Passionate Woman/Malvern Theatres

BETTY searches the attic like a prospector panning for gold, each find a nugget from the distant past.

The Dansette record player covered in dust, a Bobby Vinton album with those familiar heartbreak ballads etched for eternity in vinyl… and then the discovery of a letter that instantly whisks her back to an illicit romance of long ago.

Writer Kay Mellor’s retrospective of a doomed affair is endowed with all the regret and longing that can only have come from the pen of someone who had endured the pain of what-might-have-been.

Little wonder then that this play is based upon her own experience, and it is with admirable candour that she flings open her own cupboard door to reveal the skeleton that lies within.

Betty is briskly portrayed by Liza Goddard, delivering a Victoria Wood-style narrative of her life while she probes the secrets of the attic, a clever metaphor for the detail and detritus of the past.

It is here that she encounters the ghost of her long-dead lover, his youth freeze-framed in the preservative of death. Craze (Hasan Dixon) has attained a kind of blissful immortality despite his circumstances, while Betty has become a woman in late middle age trapped in a loveless marriage.

It’s not long before son Mark (Antony Eden) enters the attic to remind his mum that he’s getting married in an hour, so she needs to stop whatever she’s doing.

Fortunately, he can’t see or hear the ghost, and neither can Donald his dad, played with bluff northern frankness by Russell Dixon. The father is about as appealing as a plate of last week’s half-eaten hotpot that’s been left out in the rain, so it’s not surprising that Betty prefers the company of a dead man.

Paul Milton’s slick direction drives this bitter-sweet narrative along at a cracking pace and is well worth catching if you can. It runs until Saturday (April 1).

John Phillpott