| Class Cast in Vintage Ayckbourn |
At Black Rat |
| Black Rat Productions and Blackwood Miners Institute- Bedroom Farce , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , October 24, 2014 |
“Ayckbourn owns up to being all the men in the play” writes the playwright’s biographer Paul Allen of the 1977 comedy. Richard Tunley’s Nick is pinioned to his bed for the length of the play with agonising muscular back pain. Ayckbourn too had been a bad patient the winter before laid low with a bad back. Keiron Self’s Malcolm, a flat-pack obsessive of grandiose incompetence, has, says the biographer, an Aybournian habit of seeing off crises with a levity that persists beyond the appropriate. Gareth John Bale’s Trevor- with more than a tinge of Norman from Ayckbourn’s triumphant trilogy- is a blundering wrecker of schemes and plans, albeit in the utmost innocence. So too has the playwright, according to Allen, a tendency to blunder. Whether the biographer is right, or not, in linking man to fiction, there is much to enjoy in “Bedroom Farce”. The first is the classy cast gathered for a rare tour which sees Blackwood in co-producer role. It has been a while since Llinos Daniel performed in Aberystwyth and her Susannah is a high priestess to egocentricity. Her almost first line is “I did not realise there were going to be so many people.” “Well, it is a party” says Malcolm. With Mappa Mundi recharging in 2014 Lynne Seymour is here as combustible Jan. The comedy of the part is her utter lack of aptitude for the role of carer for a felled spouse. Lizzie Rogan brings a crystalline freshness to Kate, first seen engaged in marital pranks of some deep silliness, but later haunted by fears that she may be rather dull. The parents are the least complex of the four couples for all the ever-reliable aplomb that Christine Pritchard and Dudley Rogers bring to Delia and Ernest. The occasion is an anniversary, a dinner out that proves disappointing. Sex in maturity is pretty much a no-go area in performance- it requires a free spirit like Fassbinder to hit it head-on. Ernest is given a fixation with a dangling gutter and the couple ends their big day with tinned pilchards in bed. The script is vintage Ayckbourn. That has a double sense of both antiquity and value. The characters talk about sex but hover around it with a certain decorum. Kate makes confession that on occasion her mind has wandered in medias res to decisions on floor coverings. The worst language is “crikey” and “blinking O’Reilly”. The production has much fun with the period detail. Lynne Seymour’s party shoes are tottering platforms. Gareth Bale has bellbottom jeans and sideburns of Wolverine dimensions. Richard Tunley tries to relax under a zig zag patterned duvet. The jaunty score enjoys itself with the book of its time that he is reading. A good script does not wave brand names around but cannot help being of its time. The Post Office is still sole owner of the sole telephone company. The telephone, which plays an important role in the last fifteen minutes, is a bulky instrument tethered to a wall. An invalid in his bed is isolated although the script sounds as though it may have missed a technological trick. It talks of telegrams and cables when telex was the universal technology of its time. The publicity for the tour terms the play a “comic masterpiece”. A term like that needs to be used with care. An Ayckbourn play always comprises formal finish, innovative staging and an insightful intelligence. The centre of “Bedroom Farce”- not a farce at all- is a marriage in which, declares Trevor, commitment has risen to a state of “non-egotistical givingness.” But that does not make an Ibsen of the suburbs. “Bedroom Farce” features in a theatre book of importance, Michael Blakemore’s “Stage Blood.” A Ben Travers had been intended for the National Theatre but by directorial fiat was replaced by “Bedroom Farce”. Serious questions were asked at the time about subsidised theatre’s need to embrace the most commercially successful playwright of his era. “Bedroom Farce” is at least accomplished theatre, which is more than can be said about some of this autumn’s offerings, but it is a still a question that begs the asking. The tour of “Bedroom Farce” continues to the Stiwt, Taliesin, Theatr Halliwell and finishes November 6th-8th at the Richard Burton Theatre. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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