“Possum Trot is a small story told with sincerity, humour, and real heart.”
There’s something about the Tabard Theatre that always makes me glad to slip into someone else’s story for a while. The space is compact enough that you can hear the actors breathe almost but somehow it always manages to hold far more than seems architecturally possible. Possum Trot takes full advantage of that, turning the stage into a diner that feels lived-in, tired, affectionate, and strangely comforting.
Kathy Rucker’s one-act play is a gentle, feel-good piece, not in a sugary way, but in that warm, quietly truthful way that makes you recognise people we have all met at some point in our lives, towns we have passed through, and choices most of us would have struggled with ourselves. Possum Trot is a story about the tension between tradition and change, told with humour, affection, and the kind of emotional honesty you only find in places where everyone knows each other’s business.
Somewhere in the middle of it all sits Maxine. Sarah Berger plays her with the particular grace of someone who has been the glue holding everyone together for far too long. She is the pulse of the diner, the centre of gravity for every character who wanders through the door, and the person around whom the whole emotional arc revolves. I think the triumph of the play comes from watching her shift slowly, but bravely from resignation to possibility, from stay to leaving.
The design team managed to turn the Tabard’s intimacy into an advantage. The diner looked beautifully patched together. The surfaces are a bit worn, colours a little faded, as though every bit of the place has absorbed decades of stories. My favourite bit of trickery was the creation of the “basement” during the storm. With nothing more than lanterns and sound, the space seemed to drop beneath our feet. It felt as if we were suddenly invited into a secret room that shouldn’t possibly exist within a theatre this small.
The humour throughout the play is unpretentious. One moment that had the whole audience laughing involved the neighbour’s cow crashing onto the roof, an image that felt part biblical omen, part surreal farmyard version of Dorothy’s house landing in Oz. It’s absurd, sure, but also perfectly in tune with the way this play treats misfortune: with a shrug, a sigh, and a joke.
“Tradition is peer pressure from the dead,” someone says, and the line makes the audience laugh again. But the more the night goes on, the more that sentence becomes something like the play’s quiet motif. There is love in tradition, but there’s also fear and preassure. There is community, but also confinement. And every character stands somewhere on that border between staying put and breaking free.
The ensemble around Berger supports this theme with a light, natural chemistry, each character tugging gently between past and future, routine and reinvention. Together they create a town that feels stuck in the past yet full of people desperate, in their own ways, to move.
By the end, I felt uplifted. Possum Trot is a small story told with sincerity, humour, and real heart. It proves once again that the Tabard is one of London’s loveliest spaces for discovering intimate theatre that leaves you thinking long after you’ve stepped back into the world outside.