The Market Deeping Model Railway Club - all aboard for the new play at Nottingham Playhouse

★★★

Everyone is grieving the loss of something.

Photo by Marc Brenner

For the members of the Market Deeping Model Railway Club, this ranges from the use of a healthy hand and heart to a relationship with an estranged son or distracted spouse. These men (white and old, by their own descriptions) gather once a week for their club meeting, where they escape back into miniature versions of a world gone by.

Billy Ivory's newest play is inspired by the true events that unfolded in Lincolnshire in 2019, when, on the eve of attempting to claim the Best in Show category for the third year running, their exhibit was destroyed in a thoughtless act of vandalism. More than just the models, it left relationships, self-assurance, and morale in devastation and highlighted the severe lack of time left to fix them.

In the fictionalised clubhouse, designed by the always-stylish Soutra Gilmour, with a retro colour palette of block primary colours and prints, we get to know the core (and only) members. As the group's rule-abiding chairman Graham, Adrian Scarborough leads with an assuredness, with elderly gent George (Geoffrey Beavers), a Leftie Neil (James Bradshaw), the opposing, vengeful Chris (Matt Bardock), introverted Ken (Deka Walmsley) and enthusiastic Geri (Paul Bradley), who all marvel at the arrival of the young enthusiast Jordan (Babatunde Aléshé) who is equally as taken by the eccentricities of the hobbyists. To be fair to him, he has met the fellas on a night laced with MDMA.

Ivory's script is chock-a-block with the wordy dialogue of men who wait all week to be in a room where they're understood. It's in these lengthy conversations that the men explore their views on changing technologies (the sound cards are affecting George's pacemaker), politics (the county has more Brexiteers than any other region), family, relationships, mental health, and much more. It is peppered with enough jokes to get sniggers out of the press night crowd, and enough polite smiles for those who feel like they're on the wrong side of the track to understand the joke (me).

A clock resets diligently to 7:30pm for each new meeting, while a year passes by with Christmas decorations replaced with handheld fans. This sense of time ticking hangs heavy with the determination to leave a legacy. Adam Penford enlists the help of the Playhouse's supernumeraries to reset each scene - maneuvering models and tables, cleaning up plates of pizza, heaving in bags of Royal Mail post, and turning the railway signals to green. Against the look of Gilmour's thrust set it gives the impression of a doll's house with the lowly folk locked in a scene of their own making, naive to all that is happening outside the door. It's an ambitious idea, novel even, but in practice it just caused an irritating delay - but not a delay long enough to get any sort of compensation from Trainline.

The same ambition is in Alexandra Faye Braithwaite's sound design, taking classic rock tunes and house anthems and shoehorning them into set changes with Howard Hudson's jarring nightclub lighting. It is true, we learn, that Linda, Graham's loyal but fed-up wife, has a secret past of clubbing and women's peace parties, and Ken is suffering PTSD from his time in the Falklands, but these revelations do little except attempt to wrap Ivory's script in a neat bow.

Scarborough is a great physical comic when miming Rod Stewart on the phone (the music legend donated 10K to the group after the incident), and Beavers was equally excellent with his running gag of wearing too many coats. These perfectionists, completists, are analysed as closely as they do their creations. Video projections help to envision the worlds that exist in the modeller's memories and detailed layouts carry enough presence that after the show, audience members are up to inspect Woodcroft up close.

The Market Deeping Model Railway Club isn't exactly full steam ahead, but passengers are sure to have a pleasant enough journey.