Theatre - And His Name Was Jim

Tuesday morning; the actor Peter Faulkner drives me from his house in Lansdown Place to Laughton Lodge, an interesting community development just beyond Ringmer which used to be a lunatic asylum. Peter is one of the three performers in the play And His Name Was Jim, the first show being performed by The Company, a theatre group dedicated to touring the local area. They are playing twice in the All Saints, on the 6th and the 13th, and I’ve been invited to sit in on a rehearsal, a week before the opening. They play out the first two scenes, using a few bare props, and I grasp the gist of the plot from them. Jim, played by The Company’s producer Stephen Israel, is a middle management executive based in Uckfield who is in mid-life crisis. He copes with this by inhabiting a fantasy world, in which he becomes a cowboy. Nobody knows about his obsession: we see him hiding his boots and Stetson in a hurry as his wife (Emma Kilbey) arrives home one evening, and reverting to his normal accent. He tells her he has just got a promotion in his job. You can tell he is lying.

Things start going really wrong when his best friend, Matt, arrives back from a tour of the United States. Matt is a roadie with a rock band, and is living the sort of fly-by-night life Jim aspires to. At this point Jim’s fantasies start going wrong: Matt appears in his daydreams as gunslinger Matt Chisholm, who threatens him to a duel, and gets off with his gal, Roxanne, the barmaid (the alter-ego of his wife Jen). It turns out that Matt and Jen had an affair before the couple met, and Jim can barely contain his jealousy about this. I enjoy myself watching the scenes: it makes me want to see more. I love narratives about middle-aged men in crisis, for some reason.