A GAME OF GOLF. To 30 April.

Scarborough

A GAME OF GOLF
(Intimate Exchanges)
by Alan Ayckbourn

Stephen Joseph Theatre (The Round) To 30 April 2007
7.30pm
Runs 2hr 35min One interval

TICKETS: 01723 370541
www.sjt.uk.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 April

Intimate Exchanges plays Off-Broadway at 59E59 Theaters 31 May-1 July 2007. www.59e59.org

Ayckbourn’s eightsome is a hole-in-one.
The series of 8 Intimate Exchanges (16 counting the variant short concluding scenes) is a pattern, not a progression. My voyage ends on the golf course, but that’s mainly chance. It might seem the different stories that develop from a momentary decision, to smoke or not, are chance-based too.

But the lives of the 6 central characters, disgruntled, drunk headteacher Toby Teasdale and his unhappy wife Celia, trying to keep up appearances, their friend Miles Coombes and his bored, unconventional wife Rowena, along with a lower social stratum represented by gardener/caretaker Lionel Hepplewick and his on/off girlfriend Sylvie Bell, tell a different story. What happens to them is born of circumstances, but also of their characters.

While chance sorts events into two groups of possibilities, depending on whether Celia meets Lionel or Miles at the start, it’s personal decisions and the interplay of character which bring further consequences. This leads to the eternal theme of whether responsibility for human lives lies with fortune, fate or personality. Are the Celia, Sylvie, Lionel of the various Exchanges slightly different people, or the same person who behaves, for whatever reason, in a different way?

A Game of Golf includes some searing marital truths alongside the cameo comedy of Celia’s mother and local worthy Irene Pridworthy. Foul things are said on the fairway, the rules of the game mean little to Toby or Rowena, for different reasons. Yet Claudia Elmhirst’s Rowena, lying back on a bunker, talking frankly about her sexual escapades, suddenly seems a more deeply-felt character than elsewhere in the octet.

The theme of male friendship and its weighing against relationships between man and wife emerges here as a genuine concern for the often-playful Rowena. This apparently amoral woman evidently has an individual, deeply-felt moral sense, and it’s Elmhirst’s triumph in this play to express it so vividly.

The plays’ final scenes are set, five years later, outside a church, the stage bestrewn with graves. The tone is quiet and elegiac, the sense of resolution either hopeful or deeply sad. Both actors catch this beautifully. It’s been a wonderful voyage, superbly conducted.

Celia Teasdale/Sylvie Bell/Josephine/Irene Pridworthy/Rowena Coombes: Claudia Elmhirst
Miles Coombes/Toby Teasdale: Bill Champion

Directors: Alan Ayckbourn, Tim Luscombe
Designer: Michael Holt
Lighting: Ben Vickers

2007-04-29 23:29:27