Gripping for its entirety, lingering in your thoughts for days after and doing a fine job of lulling the audience into thinking it is something that a plot twist brilliantly reveals it is not. Great show.Maggie (played brilliantly by Fiona Glascott) joins a sewing group in pre-industrial England in an attempt to learn from them and the much simpler community they exist within. Maggie quickly begins to evolve the humdrum order and pace of the sewing group with greater and more innovative developments, culminating in what becomes the symbol and metaphor for the entire piece: a quilt made up of a dead man’s clothes.
The piece opens with a dozen short scenes outlining Maggie's first foray into the sewing club - scene changes are marked with regular pitch-black black outs that are married to an aggressive and clangy harpsichord accompaniment.
Sarah Niles and Jane Hazelgrove, as the two original members of the sewing group, are excellent: their intense, detailed work in the sparse, silent, Caryl Churchill-esk early scenes are devoid of any emotional subtext making it, and them, quite haunting to behold.
The entire company are very strong, but a cracking performance from lead Fiona Glascott is vital to the overall impact of the piece from start to end. Without her unnervingly sparky and front-footed performance the piece could easily feel disjointed and absurd, rather than its sublime crescendo.
There are lighter moments but, this is an unsettling piece. An 80 minute meditation upon a world devoid of technology where life is so very simple that it is almost alien to our generation, but more than that, our current society is so propagated with technology that the play's world is just about dead to us - a ghost from our past.
As the piece reaches its climax there is an uncomfortable question asked of whether or not the digital age has actually affected our physical and mental make-up as human beings rather than just severely affecting our daily routine and lives in general. Worryingly, the juxtaposition of Maggie and the rest of the sewing club makes one think that the answer is a yes - an irrevocable one. Crowe names all but one of her characters with letters - A, B, C, D, E and F.
Are we just symbols in an excel spreadsheet ready to be churned through a formula? With our symbiotic relationship with technology are we becoming as predictable as the machines we've built? It's an unendingly fascinating topic expertly explored by Crowe and director/designer Stewart Laing.
They say the simple pleasures in life are the sweetest and it's certainly true of this revival of a lovely, heartwarming and unpretentious musical from a time when writers and composers simply aspired to make an audience smile and to send them home humming a song from the show.