Fancy Meeting You In Scarborough (by Robin Thornber)
"Every year for the past few years Alan Ayckbourn has written a new comedy
for the summer season of theatre in the round he directs at Scarborough
Library. Some of them, like Relatively Speaking, and How the
Other Half Loves go into the West End. Time and Time Again has just finished at the Comedy and last year's offering at Scarborough Absurd
Person Singular, opens at the Criterion next month. Mr Ayckbourn
clearly finds traditional boulevard comedy less than totally demanding. His
material shows the usual preoccupation with middle-class marital
embarrassments although the writing is upbeat and flip, with more than usual
social awareness and psychological perception. But his real talent lies in
the ingenuity with which he revitalises conventional dramatic forms.
This year he's written three plays. They all deal with the same fraught
family weekend, but each takes its slice of action from a different part of
the house. So the first play, which opened this week, stays in the dining
room. And as the characters come on and off they are walking into the plots
of Make Yourself at Home, which opens next Monday and happens in
the living-room, or Round and Round the Garden, which comes into
the repertory next month. Each play is complete in itself and they can be
seen in any order.
So Fancy Meeting You is inevitably a bit like one of those
paragraphs headed, "New Readers Begin Here;" There's dumpy, frowsy Annie
(Rosalind Adams) left at home looking after Mum while her bluff brother Reg
(Stanley Page) and chilly sister Ruth (Janet Dale) have gone off to marry a
highly-strung Sarah (Alex Marshall) and a passionately romantic Norman
(Christopher Godwin) respectively, Norman invites Annie - who you will
realise is his sister-in-law - to a dirty weekend in East Grinstead; and now
read on. Amazingly, it works. The whole company plays with a deliciously
restrained degree of zest, particularly during a disastrously high-pitched
meal, or rather a row round the dining table, which is typically Ayckbourn.
If the play seemed sometimes slow and eventually overlong, that's what the
Scarborough season is there to find out,"
(The Guardian, 20 June 1973)
Make Yourself At Home In Scarborough (by Robin Thornber)
"I wrote down a few of the jokes to pass on to you. But you wouldn't really
appreciate them. They wilt like cut blooms when you take them from their
context. It's partly because Alan Ayckbourn's new play, Make Yourself at
Home, is the middle one of a series of three, all about the same family
house party.
I saw the first one, Fancy Meeting You, and it gave this an extra
dimension of underlying chuckle, a nudge and a wink every now and then like
someone at a party with a private joke. It also, of course, meant that you
knew the basic structure of the plot. But the story of Norman's disastrous
attempt to seduce his wife's sister has enough new twists to keep you biting
your nails until the third glimpse of chaos Round and Round the Garden
comes into the repertory next month.
But there's more to it than that. Mr Ayckbourn's hothouse jokes go all limp
and sorry when you turn them over in your hand because they belong not only
to the plot but also to the cockpit atmosphere of that intense little
theatre-in-the-round in Scarborough Library.
This may sound high flown for what is, after all, nothing more than a
light-hearted seaside comedy. But the company, directed by Alan Ayckbourn,
succeeds through enthusiasm and meticulously observed acting in building up
an emotional involvement that sucks you in like a whirlpool. Ronald
Herdman's plodding, naive vet; Rosalind Adams's long suffering Annie,
waiting for him to propose; Stanley Page's genial hen-pecked Reg; and Alex
Marshall's hyper-tense, organising wife; Janet Dale's superior Ruth, and
Christopher Godwin's gangling ebullient Norman: you get to know and love -
and recognise - them all."
(The Guardian, 27 June 1973)
Round And Round The Garden (by Robin Thornber)
"So there's Norman
rolling on the grass with Annie, when his wife Ruth, who is Annie's sister,
comes on and so Tom, who is Annie's boy friend, grabs Ruth, because he thinks
she fancies him, although she doesn't really, and then Sarah is shocked
because she thought Norman was after her and poor old Reg, her husband,
can't roll around with anybody because Annie and Ruth are his sisters . .
you make take notes if you think it will help.
Round and Round
the Garden is the third in a trio of new comedies written and directed
by Alan Ayckbourn for the summer season of Theatre-in-the-Round at
Scarborough Library. This one deals with what was going on in the garden,
while Fancy Meeting You and Make Yourself at Home which opened
in repertory last month, looked at what was happening in the dining room and
living room respectively, during the same weekend. Got that? Good.
Each play is
complete in itself and you can see them in any order. But for the next
couple of weeks at least they'll be run so that you can see all three in
series on consecutive nights. And taken together, as they really should be,
unless you are content to be only 30 per cent muddled, they amount to a lot
of laughs. Big rollicking belly laughs at the broad farce, nudging, knowing,
sniggers at the way developments of plot and character are linked from play
to play and quiet chuckles of recognition at the tell-tale minutiae.
You might
occasionally experience a nagging irritation that Mr Ayckbourn's ingenuity
as both a writer and director should be spent, even squandered, on matters
so trivial. His brittle brilliance, and the closely observed and
enthusiastically performed playing of Stanley Page, Alex Marshall, Janet
Dale, Christopher Godwin, Rosalind Adams, and Ronald Herdman, all the acute
social and psychological perception of both director and company seems
wasted on a middle-class marital romp. But mostly you're too caught up in it
all, too disarmed by the charm of these flawed and fallible lovable little
people with their limited aspirations and lesser achievements. You're
laughing too much for such carping thoughts.
And then look at the
audience, talk to the performers. As one of the company said to me last
time, this is one place where your idealism comes back."
(The Guardian, 11 July 1973)
Simple Pleasure
"Alan Ayckbourn, so far as I know, has never claimed that his plays - at
least, those which first see the light of day at Scarborough - are anything
more than enjoyable comedies. An Ayckbourn evening is characteristically one
of simple pleasure, unfettered by brow-wrinkling "messages" or the sort of
inner meaning other playwrights like to think their work possesses.
The idea of three separate plays taking as their theme the action of a
single week-end, seen from various parts of a large house, is an ingenious
one, Fancy Meeting You, the first of these, views the week-end as
seen in the dining-room, into which a varied collection of very recognisable
characters erupt.
As with all Ayckbourn plays it is funny, fast, and entertaining,
The six characters are well-observed. You and I both know people just like
them. Perhaps this is the secret of Ayckbourn's success.
There is little to criticise in the acting. Stanley Page, as the
determinedly-cheerful husband of a prissy, self-centred wife, was excellent.
Alex Marshall, the wife in question, was just like hundreds of women who use
child-bearing as a passport to conspicuous suffering. Christopher Godwin, as
the pathetically philandering husband, and Janet Dale, his hard-as-nails,
careerist wife, both turned in faultless performances.
Ronald Herdman, as the grotesque but appealing twit, Tom, got more laughs,
and perhaps more sympathy, than anybody else in the cast. He deserved it.
But my favourite was Rosalind Adams, whose portrayal of the drab unmarried
sister who everybody uses, was intensely skilled.
The only flaw in the play itself seemed to me to be the ending, of which,
though it was predictable, somehow clashed with the mood of the rest of the
evening. I felt Ayckbourn was digging a little too deep into his characters.
A joke's a joke, and, for the audiences the Library Theatre attracts,
shouldn't be taken too far. Sad though it may be to admit it, they don't
want to be made to think.
By the way, two instances of audience reaction earned my intense gratitude.
One was the fact that, when poor, goaded Tom finally gave his tormentor a
clout, the audience cheered. The other was the gasp which greeted one of the
female character's use of a very mild obscenity."
(Scarborough Evening News, 23 June 1973)
Sustained Effort (by John Draper)
"Having belatedly, seen number two in the Alan Ayckbourn trilogy at the
Library Theatre, I can report that I found Make Yourself at Home as
solidly funny as the other two, All three can be recommended to anybody who
has not yet made the trip to the theatre.
Much of the credit for this must go to the cast, whose energy and skill is
maintained throughout all three plays. That sort of sustained effort is very
hard to do, and it was interesting to see how the characters became more
credible and rounded with each production.
Mr. Ayckbourn was splendidly consistent, too. For example, Alex Marshall's
horrible wife and mother, revealed as a howling bitch in Fancy Meeting
You is confirmed by the end of Round and Round the Garden as a
one hundred per cent, gilt-edged, copper-bottomed, dyed-in-the-wool
super-bitch of the sort which has sorely tried the lives of everybody around
her; Ronald Herdman's sluggish witted man becomes so exasperating one
wonders how he has managed to escape being strangled before now; Rosalind
Adams's put-upon drudge becomes the object of deep compassion. Perhaps the
greatest achievement is that the trilogy as a whole emerges as far more
impressive than the sum of its parts."
(Scarborough Evening News, 4 August 1973)
Remarkable Ayckbourn Trilogy
"Fears that Alan Ayckbourn might find it impossible to maintain the
hilarious standards set by the first two plays of his summer trilogy were
allayed last night at the Library Theatre.
Round and Round the Garden is, in many ways, even funnier than its
two precursors, though it is in other ways more thought-provoking.
And though the play has the occasional slow moment - never apparent in the
previous two - and a thinnish ending, it marks a remarkable achievement on
the part of Mr. Ayckbourn. For without apparent effort, or any "stretching"
of material, he has made three self-contained plays out of one situation
featuring the same six players in the same house on the same weekend.
The situation has been explained before - the family has gathered because
young sister Annie, the drudge who looks after ailing mother, plans a
week-end away with philanderer Norman.
Fancy Meeting You and Make Yourself at Home displayed the
situation as seen in the dining-room and the living-room. Last night's play
is set, of course, in the garden - and a wonderful set it is, executed by
David Price.
The performances, too, have been commented upon previously - but, again, the
honours must go to Chris Godwin as that lovely character Norman, and to
Ronnie Herdman, as Tom, the vacillating vet.
Now that all three plays have had their premieres they will, from Thursday,
run in sequence on successive nights until the end of the month. Don't miss
them.
Last year the Sunday Times said of Mr. Ayckbourn that there was probably not
another playwright in the country who had his new works premiered on a
shoestring in a room above a resort's public library.
Quaint, yes, but it has stopped being funny now. Surely the Library Theatre
has proved itself. Surely Scarborough must soon wake up to the fact that is
has as a gift what virtually amounts to a resident genius.
It is a gift which could, with the right treatment, give Scarborough that
sought-for out-of-season attraction.
Instead, it looks as though the theatre in the round may be without even its
present inadequate home next year, while other, more enlightened resorts
wait to welcome it with open arms."
(Scarborough Evening News, 10 July 1973) |