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window Tuesday December 7, 2004 |
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 Something for everyone: Laura Doddington as Tammy Laidlaw, the stroppy girl who travels back in time to change the course of events and avert disaster, in Alan Ayckbourn's Miss Yesterday |
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| Time travel to take you back to your conscience | |
| Theatre Miss Yesterday Sam Marlowe at Stephen Joseph, Scarborough |
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| TAMMY LAIDLAW’s
life is a mess. Everything she touches turns to failure and her parents
just don’t understand her. Worse, her older brother is handsome,
clever and adored by all. When tragedy turns the family’s cosy middle-class
existence upside down, there seems to be little point in going on. Then a seemingly chance encounter with a mysterious woman presents Tammy with the opportunity to travel back in time and change the course of events, averting disaster. But at what cost — and where will the chain reaction end? Alan Ayckbourn’s new piece, which he also directs, is billed as “a family play”. Sophisticated (how many shows this Christmas will refer to chaos theory?) and multilayered, it’s thoughtful enough to satisfy adults; laced with wit and cynicism for teen appeal; and its sense of fun, its sci-fi fantasy element and gripping plot will please children, too. It’s all delivered with Ayckbourn’s hallmark structural ingenuity. As well as shifting back and forth in time, the play employs a freeze-frame device by which, at pivotal moments, the action halts and we hear what Tammy is thinking. The technique yields some priceless comedy, but it also has a deeper theatrical purpose. Each time that our hapless heroine faces another choice, we are reminded of all the tiny crossroads we meet on the daily path of our own lives. |
Even as we are entertained, and we certainly are, we
are uncomfortably and repeatedly impelled to examine our own conscience.
Along the way, the play confronts issues of loss, sacrifice and forgiveness, of individual integrity and wider social responsibility. It has its odd creaky moment of over-earnest pop psychology, but the force of its emotional and intellectual thrust sweeps them aside. We laugh as we watch Tammy’s surgeon father and therapist mother — both, tellingly, members of the caring professions — struggling to communicate with their truculent, disappointing daughter. But the humour becomes poignant when later it gives way to an image of the family united in grief. It’s a powerful tonal shift, and Ayckbourn manages it with consummate skill. Laura Doddington is a wonderful blend of stroppy little girl and intelligent, emergent young woman as Tammy, while Philip York and Eileen Battye are a delicately judged double act as her well-meaning, despairing parents. And Susan Twist is suitably enigmatic and, in the end, deeply affecting as the eerily watchful stranger who holds the key to the play’s puzzle. Terrific. Box office: 01723 370541 |