Following last summer’s success of Alan Ayckbourn’s explosively funny trilogy, The Norman Conquests, The Torch Theatre Company brings you two ‘stories’ from a series of related plays by the award winning master of comedy.
Start a collection – or finish one … the choice is yours – but what effect will it have on those around you?!
Intimate Exchanges is a series of comedy dramas in which multiple potential outcomes for hilarity and disaster are determined by one character's decision on whether or not to light a cigarette…. this single decision will change the lives of everybody else, blowing them all in wildly different directions.
Set against a rural English backdrop of ‘tea, cricket and garden parties’, between them two actors bring to life an entire community: Toby, an alcoholic headmaster and his neurotic wife Celia who is on the point of bolting back to mother; a nymphomaniac who is having an affair with the PE teacher; her mild-mannered husband, the Chairman of the Governors - who fancies the headmaster’s wife; Sylvie, the saucy but sweet home-help, and the infuriatingly inept school caretaker, Lionel. It is Toby, Celia, Lionel and Sylvie who feature consistently in both ‘strands’ of the two plays that you will see here.
Ayckbourn's ability to balance the comedy and pathos of people who balk at the confinement of their lives by making a mad lunge at happiness - only to find themselves trapped in eight different kinds of hell is astonishing.
Described as a piece of theatrical lunacy, with much miraculous and hilarious doubling as the partners pop up not only as two married couples but also as parents, home-helps, and other members of the school staff, the two dramas we have chosen from this ingenious collection are brilliant, tender, savage and very, very funny.
Each of the two plays can be viewed in isolation and may be seen in any order but part of the joy of seeing both is to view how the lives of the same set of people can be transformed by the circumstances offered by seemingly irrelevant decisions.This is what theatre is all about!
There are people who go round the country collecting as many versions as they can … so if you haven’t started collecting yet, here is your chance!
A Pageant
A touch of the dramatics – in love, life and on the stage!
Broadening ones horizons, dreams of life in Bermuda, crazy paving, ‘handbags at dawn’ over the leading role in the village fete production and a choice between love and art ….
"You told me to give up everything second-rate in my life, so I'm giving up you."
A One Man Protest
School Governors' Chairman and Headmaster's Wife in Potting Shed Love Tryst!
The headlines say it all, as sexual confessions in a garden shed trigger a chaotic farce of marital misunderstanding: a tale of love, lust, poems and burnt trousers...
To see a single play … is to be left with wistful, tantalizing thoughts about other possible fates that might befall its characters. New York Times |
