Absurd Person Singular, Theatre Royal, Brighton
NO writer understands better the twitchy, pent-up English middle class than Alan Ayckbourn and his Absurd Person Singular (Theatre Royal, Brighton, this week) is the rib-tickling evidence of that.
The ups and downs in the lives of three couples in the 1970s are traced in the play and we catch up with them at a trio of Christmas functions when they gather for a gossip in the kitchen.
Here a depressed and badly treated young wife is trying to kill herself by various means but is frustrated in all of them.The other guests misinterpret what she is about and try and help her.
This is the darkest piece of comedy of the evening which is loaded with some of the writer's best known types.
Lisa Kay's June delights in cleaning rugs and can hardly wait to get stuck into a dirty oven, while husband Sidney, Matthew Cottle, doing his bit with an electric light flex, comes close to frying himself.
Stephen Beckett is an ambitious architect married to Deborah Grant's Marion, a woman in a perpetual mist of melancholy.
Some of this stuff is still funny but the setpiece jokes now seem too obviously planted - like sixpenny pieces in the Christmas pudding.
Mark Gale
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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