"Marrying the Mistress"

What would you do if the life you knew for the past 40 years was ripped away from you? Or if you were forced to decide which of your parents you'd stand behind? Your family or your mother? Or your mistress? Tough questions all of them, and maybe not all answerable as the play, "Marrying the Mistress" attempts to prove. Adapted from Joanna Trollope's book of the same name, this show at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham once again blew me away. Maybe because plays strip the "Hollywood" out of a production and force it to stand on it's own, as this one certainly did.

Put simply, this is the story of what happens when a respectable judge, father, and grandfather, chooses to leave his wife for a woman half his age, with whom he's been having an affair for the past seven years. This is the story of what happens to his family. Or, as I think, his lack thereof. It seems to me that, before the whole affair, this family had lost a bit of themselves. And, while dealing with this issue caused the family to explode, you get the idea that, had this not happened, the eventual outcome would have been the same. Or worse.

This story seems like one that many can relate to, and Joanna Trollope inserts just enough humor to keep the subject light, and the characters believable. The acting was nothing short of brilliant, and you really felt the characters' pain. Sometimes you wanted to strangle them. Other times you wanted to hug them. A story like this really gets you thinking. While you may not be able to see the play, you can pick up the book, and I'd recommend you do. Sometimes it takes tearing something apart to truly bring it together. And this applies to so many areas of life. Think about it.