Improbable Fiction

Alan Ayckbourn’s bag of tricks is bursting at the seams, so he can be forgiven for digging into it every now and then. While Improbable Fiction might surprise some of the audience, those whoi have witnessed his children’s plays might feel they’re watching something familiar.
The play’s first half is quite bog-standard stuff. The action is set in the hall of a lonely man, Arnold (John Branwell), where a meeting of a writers’ circle is taking place.
Ayckbourn draws some realistic and recognisable characters here. Arnold’s an organised type, which is just as well, as he pens instruction manuals. Giles New’s nerdy and sarcastic Clem is a sci-fi writer who churns out thousands of incomprehensible words. Becky Hindley’s straight-talking Jess is a lesbian who would write Victorian romance if she ever got round to putting pen to paper.
And that’s the problem for many of these characters. They might meet once a month but there is not a lot of writing going on. Eileen Battye’s uncertain Grace is too busy drawing the illustrations for her children’s book and too intimidated by fellow group member Brevis (Terence Booth), her former teacher, to write the thing, while Brevis himself struggles to write his musical, as his lyricist has gone awol. Meanwhile, home help Ilsa, of lower social standing, mistakenly looks up to these people as the intelligentsia they plainly aren’t, while apparently harbouring desires to plant a kiss on Arnold, whose bed-ridden mother she cares for.
It is in the second half when Ayckbourn lets rip, with the story ideas presented by the group earlier coming to life in front of a baffled Arnold. Three stories from different genres and set in different periods in time unfurl, with the cast going costume-change crazy, squeezing into Pip Leckenby’s jolly designs. That it all hangs together impeccably well is impressive stuff, although the joke begins to wear thin.