A CRICKET MATCH. To 5 March.

Eye

A CRICKET MATCH
by Alan Ayckbourn

Eye Theatre To 5 March 2005
Tue-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 4pm
Runs 2hr 15min One interval

TICKETS: 01379 870519
boxoffice@eyetheatre.freeserve.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 February

Happy times on the unmerry-go-round of middle-class English life.This is one of Alan Ayckbourn's interlocking set of Intimate Exchanges, village and private-school life seen through scene after scene of extramarital lusts and marital woes, flavoured with English pre-Thatcher middle-class defeatism.

Sexual desire is swathed in embarrassment. Not that headteacher's wife Celia and chair of the school governors Miles don't go at it hammer, tongs and cricket bat in the garden shed. But when in view his shyness and her practicality (later matched by the blase quality of Miles' wife Rowena) are to the fore.

Ayckbourn's long second scene (two scenes either side the interval, the outer ones notably shorter than the central pair) shows a disastrous dinner-party with the supposedly most romantic moment, the start of an affair, mired in deception and a blazing row. Plenty of laughs here, but the underlying joke is the subversion of expectations of delight. For these mature characters, well-acquainted through the web of village life, the foreplay of embarrassment and bored habituation moves straight to arguments and displeasure.

This claustrophobic world is emphasised because all the Intimate Exchanges are played by just two actors. And never can these Exchanges have been so intimate as at Eye, where the Theatre is like a large drawing-room. Despite the structural décor, including a fireplace, the room's transformed by a grass-green carpet and some trailing leaves into the play's exteriors including a cricket field for the comic high-spot in act two.

Both players in this love-match do well. At such close quarters, Beverley Hatwell has to make some effort to suggest the age and grandeur of a headteacher's wife but she catches Rowena's tedium-induced insouciance. And, stepping in with only a week's rehearsal, William Kennedy is a catch for Eye. He shows himself a fine comic actor (not a comedian he gives no hint anything's humorous).

His characters are so funny because they find everything so serious. But flicks of facial responses, slightly delayed replies at awkward moments, make both head and chair of governors fit for our laughter. And he crowns it all with a splendid cameo as a lolling, gum-popping idle and inefficient groundsman.

Celia/Rowena/Sylvia/Josephine: Beverley Hatwell
Mikes/Toby/Lionel: William Kenning

Director: Steve Harris
Lighting: David Hermon

2005-02-27 00:41:35