September 17th, 2006
Summer’s over and though the hours of September sun have surmounted those of August, it’s now often deceptively cold outside. Blackberries are overloading the bushes prompting me to reenact my little Tom Sawyer routine: with my spindle, and hands reaching, and getting more covered in purple with every mouthful. But perhaps any such references to the days when food didn’t come in plastic punnets are lost, with the bushes being next to a busy road, the motorists–with their air-con and CD players–probably just think I’m disgusting.
Ultimately there were two moments today that really brought finality to last season: when I couldn’t be bothered to remove yet another Daddy Longlegs from my room (tissue’d), and by watching the last of the summer plays: Relatively Speaking by Alan Ayckbourn.
I saw Absurd Person Singular, also by Ayckbourn, a few years ago and I can still remember it’s melancholic madness well, which I suppose is a testament to Ayckbourn’s distinctive–if not unsettling–style. Sharing the farcical aspects of Person Singular, but not the dreamlike quality, Relatively Speaking offers a superbly lucid set of ridiculous misunderstandings.
It’s set in 1965, but essentially–give or take a few idiosyncratic jokes–it could easily updated to modern times. It opens with Greg (Charles Davies) waking to his girlfriend, Ginny (Emily Pennant-Rea) in their London flat. Ginny is getting reading ready to catch the train to see her “parents” who live in Buckinghamshire, a ruse so that she can visit and break things off with Philip (Alister Cameron), an older married man who developed a love interest in her after she worked in his office.
Greg already has suspicions that there may be another man, from the foreign slippers underneath his bed, so chooses to show his commitment by proposing to her that very morning. She defers a decision until after seeing her “parents”, so leaves. Feeling he has to meet her parents sometime, Greg follows but also arrives earlier than she does, and precedes to ask permission from Philip–who he thinks is her father–to marry his “daughter”. He doesn’t really understand what Greg is talking about, but from somewhere he gets the idea that Greg is interested in his wife Sheila (Patience Tomlinson). It unwinds from there…
For a small company, it was really cast well. Especially Cameron as Philip, a character not too unlike Basil Fawlty. The play itself was very amusing, and it’s not hard to see why it helped launch Richard Brier’s career, when the play premiered in London at the Duke of York’s Theatre in 1967. Though written in 1965, it still feels fresh and was a thoroughly enjoyable production.