by If you, like Alan Ayckbourn, had 89 plays under your belt, what would be your worst nightmare? Could there be anything more terrifying than to go to your 90th play and find that there is no audience? Worse still, what if the few who do go and see it find it irrelevant? What if it seems like a relic from another era, as dated as a 1960s polemical drama from Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 or a sexist French farce from the days of the weekly repertoire?
The 90th play is Show & Tell, and although the main character, Jack, is a retired department store manager, he exudes something of the impotent rage of King Lear, if not the fading magic of Prospero. Bill Champion plays him with a mixture of elegance, swagger and dementia-induced violence. He is a king without a domain, as ineffective as a playwright without a theater.
In a gesture that is as romantic as it is delusional, Jack books the Homelight Theatre Company to perform a “lively comedy” called A Friend of Our Own” at his house as a birthday surprise for his wife. However, it turns out that the guests – wife, family, former department heads – are figments of his imagination. A light family comedy about the misunderstandings of a doddering old man develops into an absurd drama in the style of Ionesco’s The Chairs.
The travelling actors whose performance of A True Friend takes up the entire fourth act (only because Ayckbourn can) are not six characters in search of an author, but three actors in search of an audience.
In a play where everything is acted, the infidelities of the French farce reflect the real failings of Jack’s marriage. The owner, whose slogan was “You matter,” treated his employees with the same disdain as his wife, whom he supposedly adored. His former colleague Ben (a stellar performance by Paul Kemp) is a chameleon with an actor’s instinct to never be the man he is thought to be.
The play is slow-moving, unevenly funny, and unresolved, but it is also strange and haunting; a compromise, as one of the actors puts it, between “something they enjoy” and “something they are reasonably proud of.”
