Written for the round as two plays with different endings but using the same cast. Ayckbourn has often written in this manner, whether to wring the most out of a set of well-crafted characters or a lack of decisiveness is a moot point! The latter cannot be said of Geraldine Jevons’s production.
She knows exactly what she wants and with skilful cutting and pasting gives us one concise script with well-directed characters stimulated to display a melange of English life. She pushes them to the limits of the large acting area, forcing them into the face of the near capacity audience where any weakness is under the microscope. Most of the time her bravery is rewarded by the range of feeling, change of pace and moments of tenderness. It is in the technical dept. where things show. Lighting a round set requires a greater range of lamps and there were times when limitation showed. Sadly there was too much in some places and the stage manager and his assistant/prompt could be clearly seen as a head and shoulders silhouette from my very comfortable seat.
‘To be or not to be’
We began on a bridge. Said to be in London but to me lifted straight from a willow pattern plate. Henry Bell (Dave Hudson) is interrupted in mid suicide by the cries of a fellow jumper who has been ‘caught in the act’
They retire to a transport café where the scheming Karen (Emma Holmes-Davies) her wish now ‘to be’ decides they should get there own back on those who drove them to the brink. The power of revenge harnessed to that of a woman scorned; explosive stuff.
They are joined in the café by Nick Hall and Austin Barnett, unconvincing as a lorry driver and mate, better ‘driving’ the furniture around the stage. First stop Furtherfield House.
Here Holmes-Davies is perfectly at home driving the servants with curt calls. Housekeeper Winnie (Sheila Lamb) with a wonderful west-country burr gives the geographical location. Her attempts to train the slow learning Norma (Sheila Parnaby) are a play within a play and linger long. Norma is only interested in Oliver (Lee Harris) the son of the house. Her eyes are as big as the wheels on his motorbike on which he arrives and thereafter confidently strides the stage.
A meeting of the squirearchy introduces the wickedly smiling Lady Ganton (Pam Frank), Ron Jevons struts his stuff in military mode as the Colonel and Austin Barnett appears well cast as Anthony Staxton-Billing an aging angry young man. Brenda Sanger was superb playing his wife with her ‘off-on-off-on’ relationship with Henry Bell and an unseen horse; her attention to detail a lesson to all.
Karen’s revenge plan means becoming Tick’s secretary neatly tricking Lorraine Hodgson playing Tracy into a skilful down market up hem transformation. Tick’s (Robin Sanger) slide from confident loud mouthed autocrat to a drunken incompetent snatched by the reaper was well crafted especially his death.
Brenda Riley with few lines to work with in her two roles was never going to add more than a hint of her undoubted talent. An inevitable victim of the cutting of the scripts. I would have preferred more of Brenda and less of the music which added little and was unnerving in volume change.
And so to that bridge again where the power of love bound Henry to Imogen and the scorned again Karen decided not ‘to be’

Review by
Peter Bridgewood