Marriage, according to the cynics, is solitude without privacy.That could be applied to the whole of family life as it is viewed (intimately in the round) in this interlocking trio of Alan Ayckbourn comedies. Ayckbourn’s wheeze – and it’s a ripping one – is to stage the bed-hopping events of one catastrophic family weekend in three stand-alone plays set in different rooms. ‘Table Manners’ is a four-part row over the dining table; play two confirms the impossibility of ‘Living Together’ in the lounge; play three goes merrily ‘Round and Round the Garden’.
In the reconfigured Old Vic it’s a treat to peer in on myopic career woman Ruth (Amelia Bullmore), her young stay-at-home sister Daisy (‘Spaced’s Jessica Hynes) and sexually frustrated super-wife Sarah (Amanda Root) as they all succumb to the rumpled charm of Ruth’s anarchic haystack of a husband, Norman (Stephen Mangan). Matthew Warchus’s superbly cast revival makes Ayckbourn’s brilliant exercise in comic counterpoint look refreshingly retro: these dark sitcoms are not quite the radical affair they’re currently cracked up to be but it’s good to see a middle-class comedy which doesn’t require the audience to share its characters’ self-pity, and a technical experiment made purely in the service of pleasure.
It’s the combination of all three that makes this a five-star experience (if you see one, pick the first for the play or the last for highly pitched performances). Warchus emphasises the pessimism and the personalities. While all suffer hilariously, Paul Ritter takes the palm for his superb portrayal of board-game nerd Reg, trembling with rage beneath his perfectly pressed polyester slacks. Warchus is wise to vary the pace over eight hours, though I’m not convinced these frequently farcical comedies can stand up to his Chekhovian longueurs: faster is funnier, and, for all their unhappiness, these characters, especially the women, are not deep enough to drown your sorrows in.
,Waterloo
