Cranford
Propensity to Propriety
Cranford
by Lin Coghlan and Shaun McKenna, based the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell
Orange Tree Productions at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond until 16th January 2027
Review by Gill Martin
Curtsies and candlelight, frills and flounces, bonnets and bows.
The Orange Tree Theatre’s show for the Christmas season is a perfect period choice: Elizabeth Gaskell’s beloved novel Cranford, re-worked with warmth and humour.
We meet the Victorian women of this Cheshire town, mainly spinsters and widows, all with their own baggage of bereavement, love lost and thwarted desires. There isn’t a dry eye in the house . . . but mainly through tears of laughter.
It is a hugely funny production thanks to sharp writing by Lin Coghlan and Shaun McKenna and skilful direction by Josh Roche. The script is fast-paced and full of one-liners delivered by a hugely talented cast.
We lurch from the hilarious to the tragic. There’s the ridiculous Mrs Forester (Sara Crowe) recounting how she dosed her choking cat Pussy with an emetic to retrieve a lace collar left soaking in milk. Then the tragedy of a baby born to Eliza (Phoebe Pryce) who died before taking her first breath and was discarded like an animal.
More animal humour when Betsy the cow is rescued from a lime pit, half bald from its caustic bath. The good women of Cranford fashion a scarlet costume of flannel to protect the bovine from the cold, leaving suitable flaps for milking and other bodily functions too rude to name. Decorum must be observed.
Matty’s young maid Martha (Saffron Dey) is unfettered by the rules of her elders and betters. She is expecting a baby out of wedlock and in danger of losing her job and home. Advice comes thick and fast. She fights back: ‘I won’t listen to reason. Reason always means what someone else has to say.’
And in Cranford there’s always something to say. Small town gossip travels fast and prejudices run deep. The women see their traditions at risk with the advent of the railway and influence of nearby big city of Manchester. Change in 1840s is threateningly inevitable.
Tamsin Greig leads an ensemble cast as Matty Jenkyns, who lives at the centre of this close-knit community of women, widows and spinsters, some forlorn, some formidable, all with strict ideas about decorum. Their constrained lives are governed by a web of peculiar customs and unspoken rules where trade is deemed vulgar, as is eating an orange in public.
Cranford must navigate troubled relationships, lost love, economic disaster, scandal of unmarried pregnancy, entrenched class snobbery and the challenge of holding on to what matters most — female friendship.
The women, genteel but lacking formal education or the ability to take on roles beyond house and home, far outweigh the men, whom they mainly regard as unreliable. This is reflected in the cast of seven women to the three men, who manfully take on ten roles between them. Jonny Glynn switches seamlessly between brutal cleric, Italian magician and long-lost brother. Robert Merriam cross-dresses as Young Peter and is the youthful tongue-tied lover of the spirited Martha. Michael Lumsden tends the sick as Dr Hoggins and as Tom Holbrook spouts Tennyson’s poetry and proposes a trip to Paris to Miss Matty, who ruefully declines. ‘I’m certain that would be improper. So many things are,’ she says.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1853 novel celebrates the complexities of everyday life with delightful humour, warm heart and laser focus insight. It stands as a masterpiece of Victorian fiction, and it spawned the BBC television series almost twenty years ago, starring Judi Dench as Miss Matty Jenkyns.
Now Tamsin Greig takes on this role in a very different setting. Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre is undergoing a major facelift. Cranford is the final production being staged amid the building site of this new front-of-house development, costing £4.5 million.
Natalie Johnson has designed both the set and the modest, refined costumes. She has taken a realistic wooden floor taken up to the walls of the theatre and along the balcony to create a claustrophobic space, both intimate yet stark.
In programme notes she explains: ‘We are using a lot of candlelight in the storytelling, which inevitably ends up feeling warm and Christmassy. ‘The story itself has such a feeling of It’s a Wonderful Life and that feeling of “this too shall pass”, and we have lent heavily into that. It’s fundamentally about a community of people who look after one another.”
Artistic Director Tom Littler and Executive Director Julie Weston say: ‘We don’t do a pantomime or traditional Christmas show but in the depths of winter we like to stage something funny to warm the heart.’
Well, job done.
Gill Martin, November 2026
Photography by Marc Brenner
