Malvern Theatres seems to be having a bit of a binge on Alan Ayckbourn comedies at the moment. I saw Round and Round the Garden just a few weeks ago, and last week they had not one but two productions alternating throughout the week, Hero’s Welcome and Confusions, both directed by the man himself. I couldn’t get to Hero’s Welcome, which was a shame as it is a new play, written only last year. However, work is frantically busy at the moment (usual end-of-year madness) and I was far too busy and tired to fit in a mid-week theatre trip.
The Saturday matinee however was much more manageable. Confusions is a revival of one of Ayckbourn’s earlier plays, first produced in 1974. It’s a series of five interlinked one-act playlets. As usual with Ayckbourn, they were comedies but very black ones in places. Some scenes were laugh-out-loud funny, but you also groaned in recognition at how badly some people treat each other.
The first play centred around a totally harassed stay-at-home mother, who was so overwhelmed by the task of dealing with her three small children with no help from her absent husband, that she had totally forgotten how to interact with adults. So when her next door neighbours popped round to check she was ok, she spoke to them as if they were five year olds, and in doing so laid bare the flaws in their relationship.
The second play was less amusing, and much more cringeworthy. The absent husband from play 1 was revealed to be a lecherous, drunken, travelling salesman, trying increasingly desperately to pick up two attractive women in the bar of a northern hotel. I was willing the women to slap him in the face or throw a drink over him, but unfortunately they didn’t.
The third play was extremely cleverly staged. It was set in the restaurant of the same hotel, where two couples were each having a major marital argument. However, it was all seen from the point of view of the waiter. When he went over to serve one of the tables, you heard snippets of the conversation that couple was having. When he moved away, the conversation clearly continued, but only in mime. As the waiter (and hence the audience) overheard interwoven snippets of the two conversations, it became clear that the husband on table 1 had just got back from three adulterous weeks in Rome with the wife from table 2 – but we realised that well in advance of the respective spouses.
The fourth playlet was effectively a classic farce. The wife from table 1 reappeared as the guest of honour opening a village fete. Everything that could possibly go wrong did so – unfortunate personal announcements being broadcast to the entire fete, downpours leading to a mud bath, the scoutmaster getting so drunk and incapable that his Cubs went feral, the PA system electrocuting both the guest of honour and the vicar, etc etc. It was very funny, in a slightly predictable way.
I didn’t buy a programme, so I’m not sure how the final play was meant to be linked to the others. As far as I could tell, it didn’t share a location or character with any of the preceding four. It was basically a series of monologues from five lonely misfits competing for a seat on four park benches. Each of them wanted solitude, but kept inflicting themselves on the people around them. It was very black and not particularly funny.
Oddly, I clearly remembered having seen the third and fourth playlets previously, but the other three were completly new to me. Which is strange, since apparently they’re generally always performed together. Overall, I very much enjoyed those two and the first one, and was decidedly less taken with the other two. But a hit-rate of 60% isn’t bad, especially as I’d only paid a tenner for a standby ticket.
