Thursday 11 June 2015

Round and Round the Bedrooms

A couple of years back, Soulpepper Theatre mounted an unusual and hilarious production of the complete trilogy of plays, The Norman Conquests, by British comic writer Alan Ayckbourn (read about it here:  See the Conquering Hero Comes ).  Another of Ayckbourn's unconventionally structured comedies is now on stage at Soulpepper: Bedroom Farce.  It was first staged two years after the 1973 premiere of The Norman Conquests, and compresses the trilogy's perspective of simultaneous scenes in different locations down into a single play.


Despite the title, which is itself a jab at the peculiarly British genre of the bedroom farce, this play is not really farcical.  Like the preceding trilogy, it contains a few farcical elements but plays out more as a dark comedy, a comedy whose characters are at times closer to bleak despair than any other emotional state.


I have seen Bedroom Farce staged twice before, so I thought I was familiar with the play.  But a new realization dawned on me after last night's performance -- something that has been waiting to jump out at me as soon as I was ready to notice it.  Ayckbourn grew up in a family world of broken marriages, and as he grew older he got into relationship difficulties himself, as well as watching friends get into such troubles.  Unquestionably this has influenced his writing to some degree.  I finally noticed that the four men in the play are all, in varying degrees, selfish, self-centred idiots who are completely blind to the needs and feelings of their respective partners.  The women, therefore, tend to emerge as the "victims" of the set-up (with the notable exception of Susannah, but more about her later).  Come to think of it, a similar comment could be made about the male characters in The Norman Conquests.


This play's action involves four different couples, all connected in some way with each other, and the action takes place simultaneously in three of their bedrooms.  Right away, you can guess some of the complex technical and artistic problems this script levies upon theatres which try to stage it.


Set designer Ken MacKenzie has solved the all-important problems of fitting the three bedrooms on one stage very neatly.  The trick he's used is to make the middle bedroom get a little narrower as it moves towards the front of the stage.  In this way he gains enough space to make the two side bedrooms big enough to use hold a bed plus movement space, while still inclining their back walls towards the forward corners of the stage.  The three doors are neatly placed almost adjacent to each other up centre, but so arranged that each one has its own discrete access to the backstage area.  Each bedroom has its own distinctive look and feel, in furnishings, in wall coverings, and in floor coverings.  The walls include some charmingly cockeyed doors and windows.  They might work as perspective from the right height, but I suspect that they were deliberately made to look "off".


Lighting designer Louise Guinand came up with appropriately different lighting for each room, keyed to the hanging or standing light fixtures in each case.  She also did a very neat job of keeping the light locked onto the lines where the floors change from room to room.


As far as I could see, no heads every strayed into adjoining rooms when actors came near those lines.  One or two shoulders may have done, but this was probably unavoidable -- especially in the middle room, which was by far the most cramped (by intention).


The first bedroom we see occupied, down left, belongs to Ernest and Delia, a couple in their middle years.  It has a comfortable middle-class air to it, and is the only one on the set with an ensuite.  That's a requirement of the script in Act II in particular.


Ernest, played by Derek Boyes, is perhaps the blandest character of the lot.  He endures a lot, suffers a lot, and takes it all with good humour until the pressure gets to be too much.  When he does explode, the transformation is memorable, to say the least.  So is the shocked reaction from Delia which makes it plain that this has probably never happened before in all their years of marriage.


Corrine Koslo's Delia is the most stereotypically British comedic character of the entire cast.  That's exactly the way the part is written.  If you think of Patricia Routledge in Keeping Up Appearances, you'll have a very good idea of this character and the way her mind works.  She gets the best of the laughs in the early running because she makes the most breathtaking leaps of subject, object and logic which leave poor Ernest gasping for air.  Koslo delivers all these wonderful lines with turn-on-a-dime comic timing, perfectly deadpan, and in a marvellous voice that's always clear as a bell without shouting.  In fact, I can envisage her perfectly when she's on the phone, as being the person that everyone in the room at the other end of the line can hear word for word.


Their son, Trevor, is at the heart of many of the contortions of the story that unfolds while Ernest and Delia are out for their anniversary dinner in a restaurant.  Trevor, as played by Ron Pederson, has an engaging, open facial expression and vocal manner -- all of which belies the fact that he never really hears a single word anyone addresses to him. 


At one time, Trevor had a relationship with Jan.  The next bedroom we enter, stage right, is the bedroom of Jan and her husband Nick.  Nick has suffered a back injury, is confined to bed, and in this role Alex McCooeye succeeds in being absolutely the most miserable invalid you can imagine.  Aside from the back pain, he's always suffering from his fear that Jan really likes Trevor better and wishes she could get back with Trevor again.  The green-eyed monster rears its ugly head, not for the last time.


Jan, for me, is the most sympathetic character among the three younger couples.  In part, it's because she expends so much good humour in dealing with her cranky husband, but also because Caitlin Driscoll plays the part with a breezy manner and friendly, winning voice. 


Jan leaves Nick, against his wishes, to go to a housewarming party given by Malcolm (Gordon Hecht) and Kate (Katherine Gauthier).  Predictably, disaster strikes because both Trevor and his strange semi-estranged wife Susannah come to the party.


Welcome to the middle bedroom, the home turf of Malcolm and Kate, the narrowest and tightest room on the stage.  These newlyweds carry on like a pair of 10-year-old school kids, hiding things on each other everywhere -- but especially inside the bedcovers and pillows.  Funny at first, it becomes wearing after a couple of minutes, in spite of Hecht's and Gauthier's best efforts.  For me, the length of this scene is one of the few serious miscalculations I've ever found in one of Ayckbourn's plays.


Susannah was magnificently portrayed by Amy Matysio.  It's easy to play this strange woman as "all victim", but Matysio made her much more interesting by swerving wildly from confidence to neurosis to rage, and back again, all in what seemed only seconds.


Since Trevor and Susannah can never be in the same room without fighting, and since their fighting quickly turns into an out-and-out brawl, the party is ruined.  The rest of the night passes in trying to sort out the resulting complications, and in the process everyone does stupid things and makes the whole mess even worse.  By the end of the night, Jan is at wit's end with Nick, Malcolm is sleeping in the car because he's mad at Kate, Trevor is passed out on Jan's sofa, and Susannah is sleeping with Delia while Ernest grumpily has to make do in the guest room.  Did you get all that?


This is where the team spirit of the company really goes into high gear, as it must, to keep these various inane activities from [a] seeming inane and [b] becoming tedious.  This the cast has done by upping the stakes only a little at a time over a very carefully considered curve right from the moment of the fight through to the last minutes of the play when peace uneasily settles over the world the following morning around 10:00, give or take.


All the same, though, the tone isn't really farcical, as I said before, and it would be a mistake to try to make it so.  In order for it to really work as a farce, the entire shenanigan would all have to take place in one house, along one hall of bedrooms, with people madly running from room to room.  But right here is where the tone of the play becomes darkest, as it looks like all four marriages may be on the way to the divorce court.


The final scenes, where everyone and everything finally settles down, were beautifully handled by all concerned.  Each of the characters gave the distinct impression of feeling it safe to relax, just a bit, as the volcanoes of their respective spouses' tempers finally stopped erupting.  This production did a masterly job of winding down the tension, bit by bit, until the final moments of the show.


Director Ted Dykstra deserves a world of credit for pacing this intricate show so carefully, and for creating believable characters out of each of these people, almost all of whom in their different ways make life miserable for those around them.  I also credit him for keeping the overall tone light enough that the audience still felt comfortable laughing at the antics of the company.

No comments:

Post a Comment