Top of the Wold – Marsden Mechanics

Writer/Lyricist: Maeve Larkin

Composer: Robert Cooper

Director: Marianne McNamara

In its 54th year of touring Mikron Theatre Company took the first of their two plays into the company’s headquarters, a packed Marsden Mechanics Hall. This year both its productions have a distinctly regional flavour, Top of the Wold being a tribute to the East Riding Mobile Library, the culmination of a four-year relationship.

The mix was the same as punters have grown to love with Mikron: a fictional contemporary story with bits of history, often comically told, breaking in at every opportunity, the whole thing interspersed with comically pointed songs expertly arranged (by Sonum Batra in this case) and accompanied by the four actors on a range of instruments.

For Top of the Wold the contemporary story-line is mainly an excuse for accompanying the Mobile Library on its journey over the Wolds to Holderness and the Sea (to quote one of the songs). Catherine Warnock is the over-eager Alex, joining the Mobile Library team of Sue (Georgina Liley) and driver Bob (James McLean) to research her PhD thesis on Culture in Rural England. Rob Took crops up periodically as her cynical and contemptuous supervisor and a helpful land technician.

But the actors (a team unchanged from last year) contribute far more than that in the series of locals, yokels and old ladies who crop up along the way and in their very varied input into the songs: McLean, for instance, playing the trombone with his accordion strapped on for later in the song! Warnock is unfailingly bright as Alex until the truth of her multiple failures gets to her (why shouldn’t epitome rhyme with home anyway?) and all four switch costumes and accents effortlessly under Marianne McNamara’s brisk direction.

Maeve Larkin’s script is a tribute to the Library from its opening song, Rolling Stock, with its catalogue of routes and stopping points, and explores the history of the East Riding from ancient hiring fairs to joining up in World War One as a local (almost feudal) regiment to the area’s brief absorption into Humberside. Along the way Larkin and Robert Cooper’s song, Caravan Dreams, brings a wave of nostalgia.

For much of the tour, Mikron are as likely to be performing outdoors in allotments or pub gardens as inside, but here at Marsden Mechanics Celia Perkins’ jolly design symbolising a van bulging with books heading up hill and down dale was backed up by curtains of assorted colours. It’s the adaptability and versatility of Mikron that charm (plus the fact that the summer part of the tour is made in a narrow boat!), but the scripts are well-informed and tightly written, the songs relevant and tuneful and, above all, the actors highly skilled in managing their multiple roles.

Reviewed on 3rd April 2026. Touring the UK.