DAMSELS IN DISTRESS - 3 plays by Alan Ayckbourn
Tour
DAMSELS IN DISTRESS (GamePlan, FlatSpin, RolePlay)
by Alan Ayckbourn
Run 2hr 20min; 2hr 35min; 2hr 30min. One interval each play
Review Timothy Ramsden 8 September 2001 at The Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough
Three course fun with thrills as the new Scarborough Ayckbourn trio takes to the road.Creating a new Ayckbourn character is an acting privilege; to create three’s jam-and-cream luxury. Seven actors have done that in new plays designed for the same cast on a single set. Originally there were just two pieces; RolePlay came along as a mid-season afterthought.
They take place in a docklands apartment – for all his Scarborough years Ayckbourn’s a southerner and the only northerners evident here are the Doncaster hicks of RolePlay. Throughout there are reminders of an earlier masterly Ayckbourn, the time-travelling comedy thriller Communicating Doors, which, like GamePlan, takes a side-on look at prostitution. And Doors was the first clear example of the writer who’s dissected the miseries of modern middle-class marriage presenting family affection as something positive in an alien, mechanised world, something also evident in GamePlan.
It begins with a mother and teenage daughter left in dotcom poverty by a runaway husband/father. Life’s so tight they’re selling the wharf-side home and moving to Doncaster. But while mum’s out scrubbing offices for a few crusts a week daughter Sorrel’s planning to use home for a cash-raising foray into the sex industry, calling her school-friend Kelly in as her maid. Seeming simple in advance, in the flesh the prospect becomes nauseating. And dangerous: the girls end up having to dispose of a body.
Not so easy in these days of hi-tech detection. Enter a couple of semi-comic police who pick on the unaware mother as the sexual perpetrator. Several shenanigans later a happy end’s an uncertain prospect at the final blackout.
FlatSpin has least laughs and goes further into thriller territory At best the plot’s never far ahead, and sometimes a bit behind us, but somehow the tension holds, thanks to Ayckbourn the director and a fine cast. There are long, inactive silences where you could hear a pin if anyone dropped one. Some of the security service stuff is hackneyed but the play has the most developed central character, an out of work young female actor who finds herself impersonating the flat’s owner and being caught up in a romance that takes a sinister turn.
RolePlay seems to put us back in Ayckbourn heartland, the comedy of domestic mismatches. Justin Lazenby, a software designer from the metropolitan Gin and Tonic hinterland of Godalming, is engaged to fellow designer Julie-Ann, whose every vowel proclaims her Doncaster origin.
But really this is Ayckbourn in romantic fairyland. In the real world of London it’s hard to believe even so seriously an indecisive Ayckbourn male as Justin would stay in Julie-Ann’s uxorious embrace.
To prove this, a fairy falls from the top of the tress. She’s a foul-mouthed lap-dancing pixie, professional name Paige, and she clings to the balcony rail as she tumbles from penthouse imprisonment. Her boxing promoter boyfriend’s left her with ex-heavyweight minder Micky, who is soon knocking on Justin’s door. Paige won’t return; Micky won’t leave her, so the two sit out the dinner-party from hell with the prospective in-laws, Justin’s lush Mum and Julie-Ann’s appallingly bigoted South Yorkshire parents. It’s hardly surprising the author scores a lot of hits at these two; he’s made them such easy targets.
The real lapse is the end, where someone who’s an ace directing in the round finishes with a sight gag invisible to a large chunk of the audience. Better to remember such masterly moments as the one where a whole lifetime’s misery ahead for Justin is evoked by the simple means of Julie-Ann’s mother striking up the same tuneless sink-side singing as her daughter’s slaughtered ours ears with.
It’s the two young women who face the biggest acting demands. They’re both splendid. It’s hard to believe Saskia Butler is the same performer from GamePlan’s Sorrel, with her youthful confidence born of a priviliged childhood, fast-forwarding through every pose in the porn mags to try and hurry the garrulous bore of a client spinning his life-history before her, to her grey-faced security operative in FlatSpin. And Alison Pargeter shifts, without apparent effort, from GamePlan’s no-hope Kelly to the much harassed Rosie of FlatSpin and Justin’s hauntingly attractive rescuing angel in RolePlay.
Somewhere around the centre of the middle play the two have a duel, security guard and jobbing actor in anger-fuelled rivalry at whose training is the tougher. Sit back and admire the performances; relax and enjoy the characters. Both are absorbing in these fine comedies.
Touring to Bowness on Windermere, Newcastle under Lyme and Bolton (GamePlan and FlatSpin only).
GamePlan
Lynette Saxon: Jacqueline King
Sorrel Saxon: Saskia Butler
Kelly Butcher: Alison Pargeter
Leo Tyler: Robert Austin
Dan Endicott: Tim Faraday
Grace Page: Beth Tuckey
Troy Stephens: Bill Champion
FlatSpin
Annette Sefton-Wilcox: Beth Tuckey
Rosie Seymore: Alison Pargeter
Sam Berryman: Bill Champion
Edna Stricken: Jacqueline King
Maurice Whickett: Robert Austin
Tracy Taylor: Saskia Butler
Tommy Angel: Tim Faraday
RolePlay
Julie-Ann Jobson: Saskia Butler
Justin Lazenby: Bill Champion
Paige Petite: Alison Pargeter
Micky Rale: Tim Faraday
Derek Jobson: Robert Austin
Dee Jobson: Beth Tuckey
Arabella Lazenby: Jacqueline King
Director: Alan Ayckbourn
Designer: Roger Glossop
Lighting: Mick Hughes
Costume: Christine Wall
Music: Keith Jarrett
Fight director: Richard Ryan
2001-09-23 13:18:07