‘A One Man Protest’ and ‘A Pageant’
Torch Theatre, Milford Haven
It’s your birthday and your favourite grandmother has popped round carrying a Morecombe and Wise DVD box set, wrapped with a level of skill and care you will never match even if you live long enough to get a telegram from Her Majesty.
But, hey! Hang about just one blinkin’ minute. Everything SEEMS normal, yet you feel in your marrow that something is not quite right here. A something that is staring you in the face but…but, you just can’t see it. As ever, gran’s wearing her normal hat and coat. Check. The scent of lavender hangs in the air, an invisible, choking miasma. Check. The top of her tan pop socks peek out from below the hem of her dress. Check. Grandad is in tow, mute and cowed. Check. And, yep, there they are: as usual, the row of medals she won for bravery fighting in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry, sitting pretty gleaming beneath the lemon rose corsage on the considerable heft of her bosom. Check, again. So what the bloody hell is it then?
Aha! At last the penny drops. Good God! Yes, that’s it! It’s so obvious now: the daft bugger has only gone and shaved off her handlebar moustache. How in the name of Attila the Hun and all his deadeye archers could you have missed that?
Cut to the present and the Torch Theatre’s summer production of Alan Ayckbourn’s ‘A One Man Protest’ and ’A Pageant’, plucked from the interconnecting, labyrinthine series of the eight ‘Intimate Exchanges’ plays, and memories of grandmother and the missing moustache soon woosh a return, flooding the mind with an unease that just won’t stop nag, nag, nagging away. Again, even though everything SEEMS in place for two rollicking nights of light entertainment, something is, well, not quite right.
The direction, thanks to Rhys Thomas, is, like that rarest of creatures, a top class football referee, invisibly excellent. Check. The set is, thanks to designer Beth Teale and (as always) the Torch’s SAS-standard backstage crew, marvellous: the Technicolor back garden of a thousand suburban dreams. Check. Apart from Mr. Prettyman, the famous gourmand and expert cake maker, there really only to accompany his friend Marj’, the packed audience exclusively comprises Ayckbourn fans wowed by last year’s sensational production of ‘The Norman Conquests’. Check.
And, of course, saving the best till last, there are the two actors, Christine Lawrence and Simon Stanhope. In playing 3 characters EACH over the course of 4 hours and 2 plays they give a superb display of full cream acting, boggle your mind with a feat of memory akin to learning by heart ‘War and Peace’ as well as that other great work of fiction, ‘The British Rail Timetable’; and, if that little lot is not enough for you, the dizzying zest and fizz they breathe non-stop into their roles is surely persuasive argument for the immediate introduction of Olympic level drug testing at theatres up and down the country.
So what’s wrong? Why the unease? Aha! The realisation is as sudden as a faulty stage light exploding in your head. Like your gran’s missing moustache, the thing that’s not right is… Oh dear! Oh no! It’s the plays themselves.
The past, it would seem, is definitely another comedy-drama, writers do things differently there.
One thing’s for certain, you’ve a pretty good idea what you’re going to get with characters named Toby, Miles, Celia and Rowena, pretty sure the plays are not likely to be exploring the daily goings-on of the checkout operatives at your local Lidls store, or, indeed, the lives of whey-faced crack dealers on an inner city estate.
So it’s no surprise at all when you’re plunged into that bubbling, pullulating plum jam of prep schools, village fetes, afternoon teas, repressed desires, what ifs, slapstick infidelity, sham marriages, desiccated sexuality, cricket matches, trapped and desperate lives yearning for change, more cricket matches… In short, that well-manicured, middle England underbelly we’ve seen so often before.
Miles is the timid Home Counties figure, a cuckold permanently trapped in the middle of his unfinished sentences. Toby is the abrasive, sexless whisky drinker, the man responsible for putting the curmudge into ‘curmudgeon’. Celia, his wife, “the rack and pinion of this establishment”, is whats-her-face: the posh, horsey one from the ‘Good Life’, a sitcom staple in a permanent state of exasperation, who says “most frightfully” all the time. And, of course, there’s the inevitable token working class character, Sylvie, easily distinguishable from the others as she’s the only one (apart from the cartoon handyman, Lionel) with an accent that doesn’t sound like the Queen Mum with extra plums in her trap and an unseen colonic irrigation implement on the go.
Alan Ayckbourn himself said that the plays “rely for their impact in our caring about the characters…we need to believe in them and worry about their outcome.” But despite the versatility of both Stanhope and Lawrence, despite their impressively effortless delineation of the different characters, the truth is that, because of the script, we don’t really give a tinker’s cuss.
Like the once loved comedy Morecombe and Wise, or any of those ‘80s sitcoms it all suddenly seems horribly dated and irrelevant.
This is, of course, partly because that mutual magnifying glass of society and comedy has changed so much since 1982, partly because the themes here have been explored with far more insight elsewhere (often by Ayckbourn himself). You only have to think of ‘Fawlty Towers’, the genius originality of ‘The Office’, or even the tautly crafted Alan Bennett monologue ‘A Chip in the Sugar’ backlit with the sort of lovely, understated melancholy that these two plays can only dream of.
But the really difficult problem for both actors and director is the restrictions imposed by the two-hander format. In the torrent of ceaseless and largely gem-free dialogue there are limited opportunities for pause and interaction, unavoidable exposition rather than real character development, and endless contrived comedy moments that do not stem from any logic within the characters themselves. Miles puts it in a nutshell when he says talking is “not a frightfully efficient means of communication, especially when employed by two people like us, but it’s the best person to person system so far devised…” You’re left with the sneaking suspicion that all the playwright’s ingenuity has, this time, been spent on the awesome demands of the technical exercise of weaving together 8 plays, rather than anything else. What we’re left with now is a museum piece showing a time when perhaps we fooled ourselves into believing the British condition and character were more easily defined and generalised.
It’s a crying shame because from the notes of the beautifully produced programme it is clear ‘Intimate Exchanges’ is a project close to the hearts of both actors.
However! However! APART from all that… Once you take a deep breath, accept the limitations imposed by the format, by the two-dimensional script, and then sit back to enjoy the remarkable performances of Lawrence and Stanhope, there are laughs to be found as well as a couple of genuinely guffaw-out-loud episodes, especially in the second and funnier ‘A Pageant’.
Lawrence’s Sylvie is easily the most likeable and charming of all the characters on display, the most fully rounded and believable, so perhaps it’s no surprise it is she who is at the centre of most of the best moments.
Many of Ayckbourn’s gag lines or humorous observations here are too pleased with themselves to be genuinely funny, too obviously set up by the preceding dialogue, or just simply too manufactured. For example, when Lawrence’s lascivious Rowena reveals her outlook on the role of house and home with “That’s why we build them, so that people next door can’t hear us shouting,” you feel like saying, “yeah, and?” Or similarly when Toby points out that though he’s had two children with Celia he’s never seen his wife without clothes, you glaze over and want to shout out “Oh purlease! Not that old chestnut again.”
By contrast, though Sylvie’s thoughtful, little, throw away aside to herself, “People are ‘orrible looking…well, they are round our way, anyway” may not look so promising on the page, because it truly seems to come from the character herself, because it is delivered from the heart, because it is not TRYING to be funny, on stage it is both hilarious and touching at the same time.
In fact, using the delicious bur of Sylvie’s West country accent, Lawrence can roll the just the single word ‘couture’ round her mouth with relish and turn it one of the best moments of the two plays; or she can use it as a texture in a wonderful scene where she slinks coquettishly up to Lionel after a night of intimacy, like a cat arching her back for approval, repeating “Really great last night, wasn’t it?” Her growing doubt, Lionel’s silence and the subtle varying of intonation she gives this simple question each time she asks it, craft and build the humour of the scene to the climax of a belly laugh.
Sylvie’s mimicking of Celia addressing an audience is also really well done and though it is eventually spoiled by having to go on for too long (so as to allow Stanhope time to change character off stage) Lawrence, like a Bolshoi diva, is given her second burst of spontaneous applause of the night.
And like the best moment of the two plays, the final and thoroughly deserved third bout of such applause is not long in coming either.
Stanhope, as he has done all night, provides Lawrence with selfless and expert support, here as Toby rehearsing both Celia then Sylvie in the role of Boudicca for the village fete from a spot in the middle of the audience, then gets his best laugh of the whole 4 hours by simply sticking his head under the fete stage to argue with Lionel.
He is soon outdone by Lawrence, however, who is absolutely brilliant in the escalating catfight she creates between Sylvie and Celia behind the stage curtains from which both characters’ heads pop out in turn.
In their unadulterated, irresistible silliness both moments are reminiscent of the famous Fawlty Towers warldof salad sketch where Basil fights a non-existent chef behind the hotel’s kitchen doors. And it is highly significant that, for once, both moments actually spring naturally from the restrictions of the two-hander format and use those restrictions to their advantage.
At the end of the second night the audience was hugely appreciative of the actors’ work and rightly so. You shudder to think what a stink even a decent amateur drama group would have made of the two plays. Though they each have the feel of the playwright mining a seam he has already exhausted, they do prove it is possible to love Ayckbourn AND be indifferent to him, both within the particular plays themselves and in comparing them to his other better material.
However, when A.A. says, “I think it (Intimate Exchanges) contains some of my finest writing,” that’s a step too far. You just know that any straight talking grandmother would hoist up her corset Hilda Baker style, stare him straight in the eye and then bring him down a peg or two with: “Really? You think so, do you? Well, I’ve got news for you, love.”
