Bedroom Farce

Comedy surrounding the private lives of four dysfunctional couples set in three of their bedrooms. In the first, Ernest and Delia return home from a disappointing restaurant outing to celebrate their wedding anniversary, and settle in for a quiet meal in bed. In the second, Malcolm and Kate prepare themselves for a housewarming party they are about to host whilst playing pratical jokes on each other. In the third, Nick is confined to bed with a bad back and tries to dissuade his wife Jan from abandoning him to go to Malcolm and Kate's party. Flitting between these three locations meanwhile, and causing chaos in each, are Ernest and Delia's son, Trevor, and his neurotic wife, Susannah.

Impressions/Performances

Ayckbourn's "Bedroom Farce" delves into that most private of sanctums, the marital bedroom, and takes a look at four disparate and variously dysfunctional couples through the goings on there. Ernest and Delia are the mature pair, totally comfortable with each other despite the lack of any real excitement in their marriage; Malcolm and Kate are love's young dream, albeit the dream is occasionally a little boring; Nick and Jan are the jaded pair who have each settled for second best; and Trevor and Susannah are a couple of neurotics who invade the space of the other couples creating chaos and disharmony wherever they go. The broad set, occupying the full width of the stage, is divided into three, representing the bedrooms of the first three couples side by side - the lighting being adjusted to highlight the location in which the action is currently taking place.

The first thing that strikes about this production is that, contrary to the title, it is not, actually, a farce - not, at least, in the classic Georges Feydeau/Brian Rix sense - lacking the fast paced, knock-about humour generally associated with that genre. Here the comedy, for the most part, is rather more subtle, having far more in common, in fact, with a TV sitcom. It is rarely laugh-out-loud, although there are some very funny moments, but overall it flows consistently enough to keep us entertained throughout. And if it all sounds a little complicated, it's really not. The story-line in fact is seriously light-weight, as the play, and the comedy, is more about relationships than story. In fact, if you were to nit-pick, there are numerous elements to the story that actually don't make a lot of sense, like why not put Susannah in the spare room instead of turfing Ernest out of his own bed so she can bunk-up with Deliah? And how did D.I.Y. disaster Malcolm ever manage to build his flat-pack dressing table from clearly too few parts? Added to that, it is more than a little predictable at times also - we have been primed by the script, for example, to know that Malcolm is D.I.Y. incompetent long before he builds his wonky dressing table so the gag about it subsequently collapsing falls flatter than the pack it came out of. But then relationships aren't always logical and people don't always do logical things, so those questions and petty discrepancies are quickly forgotten as the humour continues to unfold.

Juliet Mills and Bruce Montague are hugely amusing as the beleagured elder statesmen. Mills has some of the best line in the entire production, like when she tells her husband the restaurant will hold their table if they're late "we're regulars," she assures him, "we go there every year." But best of all is when she passes on to her daughter-in-law the advice she received from her own mother "if ever S-E-X rears it's ugly head, close your eyes before you see the rest of it." Delivered in that matter of fact, motherly sort of a way it is hilarious. Montague, meanwhile, as the slightly bumbling but well-trained husband is the perfect foil for her casual hen-pecking. Maxwell Caulfield (a recent murder victim on TV's 'Emmerdale') was suitably acidic as the crabby, somewhat pathetic, bed-ridden Nick - a needy patient wanting to keep his wife at his constant beck and call. Claire Wilkie delivers a perfectly pitched performance as his exasperated, unsympathetic, other half, Jan - dutifully taking care of him whilst showing little compassion for his predicament and desperate for a break. Both of this pair know that life could be better, but are too indolent to do anything about it - just muddling along with what they have. Ayden Callaghan and Julia Mallam share some funny moments as the in-love pranksters, Malcolm and Kate, whose domestic harmony takes a bit of a knock when she casually reveals about her mind drifting to the state of the floor during sex! Rounding off an excellent cast are Oliver Boot and Natasha Alderslade as Trevor and Susannah, the neurotic pair whose somewhat self-destructive relationship is the catalyst for for all that goes on - imposing themselves on the other couples as they teeter on the verge of a break-up. Alderslade, tall and almost anorexically slim, is especially good, funny yet endearingly sympathetic, as the chronically insecure wife canting her self-reassuring mantra every time the pressure mounts against her.

Overall, this is gentle observational comedy that breaks no boundaries, at least none that haven't been repeatedly worn through in the thirty-five years since it was first performed, and in the wrong hands could easily become dull or lame. That it doesn't is largely due to the excellence of the acting, extracting every last nuance and subtlety from the conflicts and contrasts between the characters upon which the comedy is based, and making every one of them a type that we can recognise and identify with from our everyday lives.

Verdict

A slightly dated but essentially funny and appealing observational comedy peeking into the privacy of the marital bedroom.

Don Gillan - www.stagebeauty.net