Torben Betts, head boy at Alan Ayckbourn’s unofficial school of apprentices, has written at least a dozen plays I’ve never seen. Invincible, my first encounter with the heir apparent, is a sitcom that pitches London snobs against northern slobs. The script is fascinating because it demonstrates, in concentrated form, the limitations of the Ayckbourn method and the narrowness of his psychological palette. The characters are emanations of tribal prejudices rather than flesh-and-blood human beings.
The plot begins with two earnest Islington prigs moving ‘up north’ after losing money in the recession. Where exactly ‘up north’ is unclear but the accents suggest Blackburn. The pair could win prizes for ghastliness. He’s a stammering emotional eunuch. She’s a hectoring Marxist nightmare. They decide to invite their northern neighbours around for a drink even though they hate northerners, even though the neighbours’ cat has vomited on their herb garden and, yes, even though they don’t drink. Enter the slobs. He’s a sumo-sized Little Englander,
whose specialisms include working as a postie, extolling the heroics of Our Boys, and turning Carlsberg into fertiliser. She’s a simpering sun-kissed sex-bomb with an IQ slightly larger than her waist measurement. The chief difference is that the slobs are decent, honest simpletons while the snobs are shifty, self-loathing hypocrites.
An evening of contrived awkwardness ensues. And it’s awkward because Betts forces his characters to meet only at the intersections of long-standing social anxieties. In real life, these mismatched couples would skip effortlessly past the cultural minefields and find common ground in the safe topics of childcare, primary schools or ageing parents. Instead, the radical Islington shrieker gives the slobs a lecture on the joys of communal living, and scolds them for allowing Sky Sports to soak up time and energy that would be better spent on revolution.
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