The headlines say it all, as sexual confessions in a garden shed trigger a chaotic farce of marital mis-understanding. A tale of love, lust, poems and burnt trousers, this is A One Man Protest – one of two comedy dramas in Alan Ayckbourn’s ground-breaking series of plays, Intimate Exchanges, being performed by Milford Haven’s Torch Theatre Company this summer. (Wednesday 28 July – Saturday 28 August 2010)
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, a cranky and regularly ‘tipsy’ headmaster; his neurotic wife, Celia; 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 Lionel, a handyman of catastrophic inadequacy. It is Toby, Celia, Lionel and Sylvie who feature consistently in both ‘strands’ of the two plays that you will see in A One Man Protest and A Pageant, where there’s ‘handbags at dawn’ over the leading role in the village fete production!
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 several 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 of romantic shenanigans are brilliant, tender, savage and very, very funny.
Intimate Exchanges begins with A One Man Protest on 28 July with the second play, A Pageant, opening on 4 August. Each play is a full length comedy in its own right, to be enjoyed individually in any order and play in repertoire at Milford Haven’s Torch Theatre until Saturday 28 August. Tickets may be reserved online at www.torchtheatre.co.uk or by calling the Theatre Box Office on 01646 695267.
