LIFE AND BETH. To 20 September.
Scarborough/Newcastle-under-Lyme.
LIFE AND BETH
by Alan Ayckbourn.
This original production has been restaged for proscenium arch venues in S[ring 2009, with some cast changes. Details below.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 2 August at Stephen Joseph Theatre Scasrborough (The Round).
Too little life in the people around Beth.
There’s no connection between this new play’s characters and those of its companions in Scarborough’s ‘Bump in the Night’ season. But Alan Ayckbourn’s designed it to accommodate the three male actors in Haunting Julia (1994; 1999) and the three women of Snake in the Grass (2002).
That doesn’t make Life and Beth the season’s centrepiece, more an appendix to the others’ dark explorations. Its opening harks back to the middle-class suburban comedy of his 1970s work which provided many of the Ayckbourns most popular today.
Two women are watching television. At least, Beth’s trying to concentrate, but her sister-in-law Connie talks incessantly. Gordon, Beth’s husband, has recently died. The TV’s broadcasting a carol service. And Christmas is a terrible time for Ayckbourn families. Absurd Person Singular meets Absent Friends with Season’s Greetings along for the ride?
But here comes a more recent Ayckbourn, injecting a ghost into the comic machine. In a surprise moment, Gordon materialises. And for a fair amount of the next act, in the adroit person of Adrian McLoughlin, he proceeds to set Beth straight with his narrow, ordered mind, as he seems to have been bringing bureaucratic tidiness to the celestial regions.
Liza Goddard’s Beth shows a pleasantness and patience which it becomes clear arises from a sense of disappointment in life with Gordon. These two apart, there’s little to the play, which becomes something of six characters in search of their roles. Connie gets drunk and looks for late-life romance with the vicar, but this goes nowhere, leaving the fine Susie Blake to keep the inebriated Connie somehow interesting in later scenes. As the local cleric an actor of Ian Hogg’s power is wasted.
Nor does the relationship between Richard Stacey as Beth’s son Martin and girlfriend Ella, who struggles against his rough embraces, develop. He has little to do, and her alternation of tears, silence and cordon-bleu leaves us to imagine her story for ourselves.
Being Ayckbourn, the play never falls below a certain level of amusement. But it promises far more than it delivers, while even the supposed shock moments pass for little.
Beth: Liza Goddard.
Gordon: Adrian McLoughlin.
Martin: Richard Stacey.
Ella: Ruth Gibson.
Connie: Susie Blake (2009 tour: Eileen Battye).
David: Ian Hogg (2009 tour: Terence Booth).
Director: Alan Ayckbourn.
Designer: Pip Leckenby.
Lighting: Kath Geraghty.
Music: John Pattison.
2008-08-14 12:45:20