Published 4/5/2012
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In Enfield,
A Fine Farce
By Nicola Smith
Valley News Staff Writer
Relatively Speaking, first staged in 1965, was British playwright Alan Ayckbourn's earliest significant success, and its intricate plot of epic misunderstandings, which transferred the sophisticated French bedroom farce to an English suburbia of mustn't-make-a-fuss, dear; have-you-trimmed-the-garden-hedge-yet?; let’s-put-the-kettle-on platitudes, set the stage for Ayckbourn's marvelous comedies to come.
It's being given a welcome, if slightly unexpected, revival in an inspired production running through April 15 at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield. Unexpected, because Shaker Bridge has made its name locally for staging contemporary plays by American playwrights; and inspired, because director Bill Coons and the four-person cast have brought off a giddy farce.
Plays like Absurd Person Singular, The Norman Conquests, and Bedroom Farce made Ayckbourn famous, wealthy and one of the most produced playwrights in the English language.
Critical respect has been, at times, grudging, as if Ayckbourn's subject and style were not “serious” or daring enough, in the vein of a Harold Pinter or John Osborne, although as the recipient of both the Olivier and Tony Special Lifetime Achievement Awards, and a knighthood, to boot, such distinctions don't really matter anymore.
But anybody who admires Ayckbourn (as I do) can tell you that what he does so well is extremely difficult to pull off. Not only does he make people laugh, often to the point of helplessness, but he makes it look effortless. His plays are so formidably constructed that what looks easy and completely logical on stage could make a less gifted playwright weep with frustration trying to imitate him.
The plot is too involved to detail, and to do so would be to throw a wrench into the well-oiled machinery. But Ayckbourn draws on the time-honored mechanics of farce: mistaken identity, lickety-split timing and sexual confusion.
A young man, Greg, proposes to his reluctant girlfriend, Ginny, who says that while she loves him she's not sure she's ready to marry. She tells him she’s going to visit her parents for the weekend in the country. Greg suspects there's at least one other man, although Ginny denies it. Ginny leaves. Greg follows her, knowing only that she’s headed for a house in Buckinghamshire, or, in the succinct shorthand of a postal address, Bucks. The fun Ayckbourn has with that one syllable alone is worth the price of admission.
When Greg arrives at what he presumes to be the home of Ginny's parents, he thoroughly baffles the woman he takes to be Ginny's mother, the unfailingly courteous Sheila. Sheila is married to Philip, a certain kind of ruddy, tweedy Englishman routinely spoofed by the likes of Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, Roald Dahl, David Lodge and their inheritors.
Philip appears stolid, conservative and unimaginative, and is irritated by even the slightest disturbance of the preferred order of things. But when Greg appears, order disintegrates almost immediately and the misunderstandings snowball to such a degree that reality itself becomes surreal, as if the characters existed in a parallel, not entirely comprehensible universe.
What makes Ayckbourn so funny is the way he abbreviates speech, or more to the point, what he leaves out. Everything hinges on what he omits. By not completing the phrases and sentences that would clarify matters, he allows misapprehension to flourish. When misapprehension thrives, so does comedy. And by combining that with the stereotype of the polite Englishman, who would rather die than admit ignorance or contradict someone, Ayckbourn is able to wreak comic havoc.
Coons has assembled a topnotch cast that smoothly juggles all the balls in the air at once. As the hapless Greg, Jay Stratton is sweetly befuddled, endlessly helpful (thus, in Ayckbourn's world, supremely unhelpful) and just a little dim. Greg is the catalyst for everything that goes awry, and Stratton draws on a wealth of subtly confused facial expressions and physical comedy to put that across.
Sheila, played by Kay Morton, is as befuddled in her own way as Greg. No matter the circumstance, she serenely continues on her way, confident that her own good nature will put things to right. Sheila has her own repertoire of bright smiles and small talk that cover her confusion; she may not seem the sharpest knife in the drawer but in the end she has a wisdom born of feminine experience and intuition to, as in a Shakespeare comedy, re-order everything as it should be.
Mike Backman, as Philip, perfectly embodies the suburban Englishman whose home is his castle and who resents any intrusion into his suburban paradise. He's a master of both the slow burn and stalking off stage, and he gets a lot of comic mileage out of the search for a missing garden hoe. Ginny, played by Amelia Mathews, is a delightfully duplicitous ingenue. Together, all four actors don't miss a comic beat.
“Relatively Speaking” is at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield through April 15. For tickets and information, go to www.shakerbridgetheatre.org/html/about.shtml or call 603-448-3750.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.
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