A GARDEN FETE. To 2 May 2007.
Scarborough/Bowness-onWindermere/Newcastle-under-Lyme
A GARDEN FETE
(Intimate Exchanges)
by Alan Ayckbourn
Stephen Joseph Theatre (The Round) In rep to 19 September 2006 then Bowness-on-Windermere and Newcastle-under-Lyme, returning to Scarborough in 2007
1, 7, 13, 19 September 7.30pm
Runs 2hr 15min One interval
TICKETS: 01723 370541
www.sjt.uk.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 August
Intimate Exchanges plays Off-Broadway at 59E59 Theaters 31 May-1 July 2007 www.59e59.org
Surprisingly sombre outcome for sunny suburban events.
Even for Alan Ayckbourn, Intimate Exchanges is a complex structure. Eight plays (with alternative endings, actually 16) form a domino-effect of consequences arising from a single moment’s decision – whether to have a cigarette. Five seconds taken to light-up or not, produce alternative scenes set 5 days, 5 months then 5 years later.
J B Priestley (whose influence Ayckbourn’s acknowledges) created the ‘dangerous corner’, the chance turn in a conversation that can alter lives. Ayckbourn’s multiple-choice plays offer exchanges that intimately affect the lives of potential smoker, and private-school headteacher’s wife, Celia Teasdale and those around her.
Despite these plays, like most of Ayckbourn’s, being premiered in Scarborough, their world breathes the atmosphere of Surrey rather than North Yorkshire. This is the land of suburban strains Ayckbourn made his comic territory in the 1970s, along with a pre-Thatcherite bourgeois fatalism.
But these plays appeared in 1982, just after Way Upstream had made clear a new, parable-like mood in the playwright, and horror of a new inhumanity in mankind. His old battleground the family became a place of comparative safety. A Garden Fete has the discontents of married life, but the proletarian Hepplewicks, Lionel and dad Joe, invade this with a wider malevolence.
The plays are intended to have 2 actors, with elephantine memories and mercurial powers of characterisation, playing everyone throughout the octology. Aging up’s a big challenge, but though his headteacher is indeterminate in movement from behind (the aging’s in the frontal moustache) and her Celia’s rather youthful, Bill Champion and Claudia Elmhirst do more than alright. Especially, Elmhirst’s young Sylvie, manipulated out of adult aspirations to overcome youthful ignorance by future husband Lionel, abetted by his father Joe, becomes this comedy’s tragic centre.
The tragedy is her inability to resist their pressure, as, in the comic action, she’s imprisoned in the stocks, a mock-Varlet to be pelted at the Village Fete. Stuck there, to be released only if she accepts Lionel, it becomes, in a pun Ayckbourn’s too tactful to state, a fete worse than death, as a postlude showing the pathetic remnant of her self-improvement attempt makes clear.
Celia/Sylvie: Claudia Elmhirst
Lionel/Toby/Joe: Bill Champion
Directors: Tim Luscombe, Alan Ayckbourn
Designer: Michael Holt
Lighting: Ben Vickers
2006-08-05 13:04:07