Here are your instructions. Relatively Speaking by Alan Ayckbourn is a comedy classic so you’d better enjoy it or else. The play dates from 1967 when Ayckbourn was working as a sketch writer for Ronnie Barker. It was his first hit. Notes in the programme testify to the play’s excellence. A telegram sent to Ayckbourn by Noël Coward is quoted twice. ‘Congratulations on a beautifully constructed and very, very funny play.’ Take the Master’s kindness with a pinch of salt.
The script is ingeniously strung out from a rather threadbare premise. Two couples, both with infidelity problems, meet and talk at cross-purposes for an afternoon. The action opens in a dingy London bedsit where fun-loving Ginny is entwined with a dim-witted hunk who wants to marry her. But Ginny plans to spend the day with her older lover in Buckinghamshire. She flees. The hunk follows. When he arrives in Bucks he’s greeted by a greying fatso whom she assumes is Ginny’s dad. Fatso, meanwhile, assumes that the young hunk is his wife’s bit on the side. Got it? Good.
The actors plough doggedly through the many convolutions of this laborious wheeze, and a few laughs are generated along the way. Jonathan Coy is great fun as the paunchy adulterer and he manages to make up for the dry and rather earnest approach of Max Bennett and Kara Tointon, playing the younger couple, who seem to have been chosen for their looks rather than for their ability to create magic on stage. Golden-haired, husky-voiced Felicity Kendal is highly watchable as Sheila, even though her character makes no sense at all. For the play’s mechanics to keep going she has to behave like a gullible muggins one minute and like a shrewd and perceptive minx the next.
And she’s the wrong age to play a Home Counties swinger. To pretend that she might be sexually involved with Max Bennett when they could easily be granny and grandson is simply bizarre. Her character is also accused of bedding a man 30 years her age. That would make him 96. And Max Bennett as well? Here’s the snag: a woman whose sexual tastes range across the full span of male adulthood from adolescence to advanced senility would surely prompt a gag from the author. There isn’t one. And so the play seems slightly off-kilter. There’s nothing wrong with this show but there are better ways to waste an evening.
The Pulitzer Prize is a high honour in America. In Britain, it’s a health warning. ‘May cause dizziness, headaches, vomiting and possibly unconsciousness.’ The gong has been bagged by plenty of howlers in the past and here’s the latest prize-winner, Disgraced, written by New Yorker Ayad Akhtar. We’re in a swanky Manhattan apartment where four high-earning sophisticates are discussing the great issues of the day over dinner. Yup. It’s a wrist-slasher of an evening in smug yuppie hell. The characters seem to have chosen their romantic partners purely to demonstrate their freedom from prejudice to themselves and to the world. Liberal artist Emily is married to recovering Islamist Amir, who was brought up to spit in the faces of Jews. Their friend Isaac, a Jewish art dealer, is married to a black lawyer named Jory.
The meal begins with shots of single malt and knowing asides about Amis and Hitchens, ‘a couple of sanctimonious British bullies’. Emily serves an artichoke salad that she learnt to make ‘while I was on a Fulbright in Seville’. Their natter drips with progressive chic. They discuss the thread-count in $600 Charvet shirts. They argue over the richness and spirituality of Islam’s artistic tradition. Amir tells us that the Koran is ‘one long hate-mail letter to humanity’. A favourite Kissinger slogan — ‘faced with a choice between justice and order, I choose order’ — is knocked back because everyone prefers justice. Or claims to.
Subtly, beneath the surface, frictions and tensions are simmering away but the characters seem too composed and urbane to let their real feelings break through. But then it happens. In a searing passage of dialogue, all the deep-buried racial enmities erupt like a volcano and the characters attack each other with open-hearted loathing and violence. The catalyst is the discovery of an infidelity between two members of the quartet and the revelation strikes like a bolt of thunder. What seemed a fatuous paean to enlightened values turns into a concentrated attack on their crass superficiality.
Nadia Fall’s direction is crisp and captivating throughout. Designer Jaimie Todd creates a superbly stylish New York apartment on a modest budget. Hats off to fight director Kate Waters who lays on the most succinct and persuasive piece of stage violence I’ve ever seen. All this production needs is a film star, or two, and it’ll be in the West End faster than you can say bigot.
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