|
|
| Green-eyed
monster in the garden Charles Spencer reviews Time and Time Again at the Stephen Joseph in Scarborough |
|
| This summer marks the 50th anniversary of Britain's first professional theatre in the round in Scarborough. It was the brainchild of Stephen Joseph, the son of the actress Hermione Gingold and the publisher Michael Joseph, but the young Alan Ayckbourn pitched up there as a young actor and stage manager in 1957 and remains there to this day. He has premièred almost all of his 69 plays in Scarborough and has been running the theatre, which began life in a room above the local library and now occupies the town's stylishly converted former Odeon cinema, for longer than almost anyone can remember. The anniversary is being marked by a book celebrating the theatre's history, an exhibition, and a series of evenings this week, hosted by Ayckbourn, in which he will look back over the work of the past 50 years, covering a decade each night. As ever, there's a new Ayckbourn in the rep - Improbable Fiction - but the dramatist is also directing a revival of one of his early and less famous hits, Time and Time Again, first staged in 1971. In recent years Ayckbourn's work has often been wildly uneven - with a theatre to fill every night, and his name a guaranteed box-office draw, one suspects he is too prolific for his own artistic good - but Time and Time Again is a welcome reminder of the dramatist in his classic prime. Superficially, it seems like an undemanding sitcom. The action is set in a garden adjoining a sports field, a plaster gnome fishes at an ornamental pond, and there is knockabout comedy involving disastrous games of cricket and football. But, beneath the deceptively bland surface of the dialogue, Ayckbourn weighs up his characters with the merciless judgment of Jane Austen. And the drama, in which three men find themselves besotted with the same attractive blonde, comes to resemble a suburban Othello, with the green-eyed monster of jealousy causing no end of emotional mayhem.  The young woman in question is Joan, who at the start of the play is
engaged to the sports-mad Peter, who works for Graham, one of those opinionated,
bullying males that are such a feature of Ayckbourn's work. Before long
the odious old lecher is slapping sun oil on her bikini-clad form as
she sunbathes in the garden, and making offensive remarks.To Graham's fury, though, Joan finds herself far more attracted by his despised brother-in-law Leonard, one of those apparently amiable, commitment-phobic drifters who are another recurring specimen in Ayckbourn's jaundiced catalogue of the male of the species. Poor Peter, fuming dangerously, knows he's lost his girl - the problem, is he doesn't know to whom. The play features some brilliantly developed comic set-pieces, with the murky fishpond featuring to particularly inventive effect. But sourness lurks beneath the laughter. Almost all the characters, the nubile Joan included, behave selfishly and stupidly, making themselves and everyone else unhappy in the process. Ayckbourn's view of humanity is not a generous one. The old master directs with superb assurance on a delightfully detailed garden design by Michael Holt. John Branwell, looking like a cross between Terry Scott and Les Dawson, is in wonderful form as the bullying Graham, driven half mad by jealous malignity, while Giles New mercilessly lays bare the infuriating spinelessness of Leonard. There is strong support from Laura Doddington as the manipulative temptress, Neil Grainger as her hapless betrothed, and Eileen Battye as Graham's long-suffering wife. This is vintage Ayckbourn - hugely enjoyable yet leaving an unexpectedly bitter aftertaste. Tickets: 01723 370541 |
