ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR. To 11 September.
Southwold
ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR
by Alan Ayckbourn
Southwold Summer Theatre To 11 September 2004
Mon-Fri 8pm Sat 8.15pm Mat Sat 5pm
Runs 2hr 30min Two intervals
TICKETS: 01502 724441 (Mon-Fri 11am-4pm; Sat 11am-1pm)
01502 722389 (Mon-Fri 5-9.30pm; Sat 2-9.30pm)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 September
Fine revival of a play that's both social comedy and superbly-engineered farce.Thirty years on this play, set in three kitchens on successive Christmas Eves, remains arguably Ayckbourn's finest. Richard Frost's production signs off Southwold's 2004 summer theatre season in high style.
Nerves abound throughout. At first Sidney's on the make, desperate to impress the local architect and bank manager. Narrow-minded, and in Richard Emerson's performance, hair slicked like an oil-spill blotting the landscape, always watching for advantage, he wants everything perfect.
So does his wife, for whom perfection is a home cleaned sterile as their lives. Louise Shuttleworth's flickering smiles as she tries living up to Sidney's expectations only relax into happiness when she's alone wiping the kitchen table, contentedly singing Nice work ' to herself.
Shuttleworth is moving; Emerson gets the greasy nastiness just right hovering behind the established men in his own kitchen, ingratiating himself as they talk about him in the third person.
Jonathan Jones is too young for the bank manager. Yet, an accomplished player all season, he's seriously funny in his perplexed detachment; part of pre-Thatcherite England's purposeless establishment. He's unable to see his wife floating off (almost literally by the bitter end, when Sidney finally plays his party-game, everyone dancing to his tune) into an alcoholic haze. Patience Tomlinson's benign smile covers her discontent with life.
The third pair represent the biggest problems. In a second act rivalled for technical audacity only by Michael Frayn's Noises Off Eva, depressive wife to architect Geoffrey, spends the whole time silently trying to commit suicide, causing disasters all around. Kitty Lucas' youth adds to the depth of Eva's despair - as to her residual anxiety in the final act, a year on.
Geoffrey is ultimately hardest to bring off. Matthew Storey is excellent, establishing his arrogance as architect and male in the opening act, with a confident sheen that becomes increasingly tarnished.
Though Sidney's kitchen seems over-dowdy for the 1970s, Maurice Rubens works miracles on this small stage, as the settings open out in succeeding acts. Each act has an offstage character'; it's a measure of any production how real these seem. Every act passes here with flying colours.
Sidney: Richard Emerson
Jane: Louise Shuttleworth
Ronald: Jonathan Jones
Marion: Patience Tomlinson
Geoffrey: Matthew Storey
Eva: Kitty Lucas
Director: Richard Frost
Designer: Maurice Rubens
Lighting: Robin Shephard-Blandy
Costume: Richard Handscombe
2004-09-06 03:21:33