Kitchen Synch
Absurd Person Singular
By Alan Ayckbourn.
State Theatre Company.
Playhouse.

The State Theatre Company chose Absurd Person Singular because, as it was the first time any Alan Ayckbourn had been performed professionally in Adelaide, they wanted to present a proven winner. It is a good piece and epitomises Ayckbourn’s undeniable stagecraft. But in recent years TV audiences have seen this play, Absent Friends, Season’s Greetings and numerous repeats of The Norman Conquests enough for the production to have a touch of deja vu about it.

Ayckbourn’s understanding of the unities of time and place and the disunities of human beings distinguishes all his work. He unmercifully enumerates the cruelties of everyday domestic life, the hairline cracks in the couple front and the mortifications and miscues of social display.

Absurd Person Singular takes place in three different kitchens, on three Christmas Eves with three couples on the move. The Hopcrofts on the way up, the Jacksons on the way down and the Brewster-Wrights reeling about in dipsomanic gentility. It presents class conflict as grotesque, odious and, like the poor, always with us. Ayckbourn makes no bones about it. But you have · the feeling that there has to be more to it, than that – a reason to programme a later, and more reflectively political Ayckbourn play like A Small Family Business before too long.

If Ayckbourn’s comedy isn’t black it is definitely very dark brown but director Gale Edwards has approached her task by lightening it up a shade from there. In Act I for instance Deidre Rubenstein’s Jane Hopcroft, the nervous hostess, is more daffy than manic. Rubenstein gives a good performance but there is room in the writing for a more discomforting and obsessive interpretation.

It is almost as if Ayckbourn wrote Act II for a bet – his impossible task being to create a scene where someone is trying to commit suicide and everyone in the room is too self- preoccupied to even notice. Deborah Kennedy’s Eva is both assured and unnerving and the ensemble performance takes us from gas oven to bench to live wires to the twelfth day of Christmas with creditable panache.

Act Ill brings Edwin Hodgeman and Daphne Grey to the fore and both give stylish popular performances. They do it well and make it look easy. Hodgeman’s shading and detail is always conscientious and when he borrows from Eddington, Cleese or Geoffrey Palmer it is droll and never parodic. Henry Salter has a difficult demand with Sidney Hopcroft because it is the most obviously reactionary part in the play, but he does well, unlike Mark Owen Taylor, who is completely miscast as Eva’s husband Geoffrey. It is not his fault we have seen Michael Gambon play the part on TV but it doesn’t help.

Designers Ken.Wilby and Mark Thompson produced kitchen décor detailed enough to film. Unlike their other, more mannerist designs, Absurd Person Singular is done in straight sets each bespeaking their inhabitants with convincing precision. John Comeadow’s lighting – particularly when players have to peer through windows and blunder about in the dark – is crisp and versatile.

Gale Edwards and a strong cast have produced successful Ayckbourn without pretending we all live in Scarborough. It is well-paced and pleasingly achieved but in whetting the audience’s appetite for Alan Ayckbourn’s work, State could also give it more edge. Next time- A Woman in Mind?

“Kitchen Synch”, The Adelaide Review, No.52, June, 1988, p.19.