by Alan Ayckbourn, by Melbourne Theatre Company
At Fairfax Studio
until December 19, 1998
Reviewer: Kate
Herbert
The silliness dial is
turned up to 110% in Absurd Person Singular, a masterly farce by English
playwright, Alan Ayckbourn, directed with comic flair by David Latham,
performed with impeccable comic timing on Shaun Gurton's versatile revolving
set; and what better time to set the play than during the Silly Season.
Three dysfunctional English couples of differing class and
financial solvency, collide on three consecutive Christmas Eves in a bizarre
dance of rising and falling social and emotional fortunes. Echoes of Dickens'
Christmases Past, Present and Future in three acts map the rapid rise of the
tasteless Hopcrofts from social climbing grocers to property developers.
Act One, in 1970, sees the grovelling Hopcroft (Tony Taylor)
bullying Jane, his timid, Ajax-obsessed wife (Merridy Eastman) during a
Christmas cocktail party planned to impress his dull, conservative banker
Ronald Brewster-Wright (Brian Lipson) and his ever-so-politely critical wife
Marion (Jane Menalaus).
In Act Two, a year later at the third couple's, Eva and
Geoff (Sally Cooper, Robert Menzies) Jackson's home, the previously valium-addled,
now suicidally depressed Eva silently attempts suicide as the others sabotage
her gassing, knifing, leaping, electrocution and hanging while they mend or
clean her kitchen appliances.
The final scene of this act is the most chaotic, absurd and
hilarious in as they sing On The First day of Christmas around a
laundry-bedecked electrocution victim. Yes, really.
In each home the owners become victims of Ayckbourn's wit.
Every horror of these inappropriate but outwardly proper, ordinary marriages is
callously revealed. His sardonic attack on these singular characters is
unrelenting.
In 1972, the Brewster-Wrights are living in separate parts
of an icy-cold house when visited by the others. Marion is drunk, Ronald
desperate and lonely. Social decorum cannot stop them hiding under tables from
the ghastly, successful Hopcrofts. It ends like a Monty Python Butlands'
holiday camp..
The actors teeter sublimely on the knife edge of tragedy and
comedy. Menalaus' snobbish Marion and Lipson's awkward twitty Ronald are the
perfect mismatch. Menzies is suitably maddening as the cruelly egocentric
Geoff. Cooper transforms his despairing wife from demented clown to canny
businesswoman. Taylor's Hopcroft is cleverly gauche and Eastman's Jane has her
own peculiar twitchiness.
Ayckbourn is a master craftsman. Even his off-stage
characters are hilarious. Moderns might scoff but he is the populist writer of
England and manages a laugh a minute peppered with acerbic social observation.
by Kate Herbert
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