IF I WERE YOU. To 21 June.
Manchester.
IF I WERE YOU
by Alan Ayckbourn.
Library Theatre To 21 June 2008.
Mon-Thu 7.30pm Fri-Sat 8pm Mat Thu & Sat 3pm.
Audio-described 14 June 3pm, 18 June 7.30pm.
BSL Signed 19 June.
Captioned 20 June.
Runs 2 hr 10min One interval.
TICKETS: 0161 236 7110.
www.librarytheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 June.
If I were you, I’d see this.
A couple of Alex Jones’ plays have been premiered at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre. Jones also wrote a full-length piece, Phil & Jill & Jill & Phil, seen in Worcester and Coventry in 1999, in which a husband and wife swap bodies.
Did Scarborough’s playwright-director Alan Ayckbourn ever come across this? For the idea’s reprised in his 2006 Scarborough play, now revived in Manchester. Or did Ayckbourn, who has often reworked his own plays, look back to his 1990 Body Language, in which two women, a model and an overweight journalist, exchange bodies.
Body Language has a male character called Mal, as does If I Were You. It’s not one of Ayckbourn’s successes, even as revised for Scarborough in Phil & Jill’s 1999. Fortunately, in his newer play, Ayckbourn dispenses with a complex set-up, simply letting the exchange between bodies take place while they sleep.
The swap arrives just before the interval, but time till then has been well used, drawing characters and showing an everyday (i.e. unhappy) Ayckbourn stage marriage. Sympathy is firmly with put-upon, stay-at-home Jill, wife to furnishing-store manager Mal.
After the change, she goes to work in his body, bringing humanity in place of macho-management and disastrous customer-relations. Meanwhile Mal’s islanded at home, fiddling with domestic minutiae. Teenage son Sam wonders at his parents’ surprising new (in)competencies, while married daughter Chrissie and Mal’s unseen, indigent lover Trixie receive varied surprises.
Chris Honer’s Library revival actually seems an improvement on the author’s premiere: cleaner-limbed, more tense as surprises approach, keenly showing character truths without undoing comic impact. Another delightful Dawn Allsopp set fits equally well as home or store display, under shifts of Ian Scott’s lighting, and with Jon Nicholls’ music swathing the showroom scenes in a soft, eerily insistent aural blanket.
There remains the disjunction between two levels of acting; the pantomime-like reproduction of the other sex’s physical characteristics and the understanding of their thought processes. But a good cast bring Ayckbourn’s observations to life, with Meriel Schofield sharply-focused in both comic moments (‘Mal’ struggling with cosmetics) and with the vividly-felt experience of Jill’s inner life.
Mal Rodale: Bill Champion.
Jill Rodale: Meriel Schofield.
Sam Rodale: Arthur Wilson.
Dean Snaith: Phil Cheadle.
Chrissie Snaith: Amy Searles.
Director: Chris Honer.
Designer: Dawn Allsopp.
Lighting: Ian Scott.
Sound: Paul Gregory.
Composer: Jon Nicholls.
Fight director: Renny Krupinski.
2008-06-12 01:56:25