My Wonderful Day (Tour – Oxford)
Alan Ayckbourn’s name has long become synonymous with light-hearted, bourgeois comedies and his seventy-third offering for the stage runs much along the same lines – only he has done much the same before and much better. Despite some genuinely hilarious lines and the best efforts of a talented team of comic actors, the play fails to hang together as a whole, a fault that lies with the script.
The premise is a simple one: we follow one day in the life of eight year-old Winnie. Too ill for school, she accompanies her heavily pregnant mother to her cleaning job in the Tate household and quietly observes the unfolding chaos. Of course this will be no ordinary day: Kevin Tate is playing away with employee, Tiffany, his wife is plotting vengeance and Winnie’s mother inevitably goes into labour, leading to general uproar and a series of comic albeit slightly predictable situations.
The major problem with this play is that there is just not enough plot to it so that after a promisingly energetic and amusing beginning, it staggered through an uneventful and dull middle section until picking up again with the entrance of Paula. It ran for nearly two hours without an interval but was too long and not interesting enough to get away with doing so and unfortunately not even the occasionally brilliant one-liner could save it.
The actors did the best they could with the flawed script, giving some impressive character performances. Ayesha Antoine successfully captured the physicality and mannerisms of childhood and her facial expressions were often hilarious as Winnie becomes more and more perplexed by the strange behaviour of the adults in her midst. Alexandra Mathie gave a delightfully acerbic performance as betrayed wife Paula, whose entrance injected some much needed energy and humour into the flagging show. Her lines were perfectly delivered and rank amongst the most entertaining of the entire play.
My Wonderful Day is occasionally hilarious but nevertheless struggles through a dull and prolonged middle section in which Ayckbourn seems to run out of ideas. The play simply does not have enough substance to stretch over the hour and forty-five minute run and what there is, stretches very thin. When you must resort to reading The Secret Garden out to your audience for ten minutes, you know you are in trouble. For the rest, it is amusing enough but predictable and fairly conventional. Certainly, if you want to see some Ayckbourn, it might be better to seek out one of his more successful plays.
– Alice Fletcher
