Synopsis Welcome to a tea party you'll never forget, as Alan Ayckbourn's classic comedy of manners and social embarrassment, Absent Friends serves up a slice of deliciously black humour at the Harold Pinter Theatre!
When Colin loses his fiancée, his married friends invite him round for comfort over tea and sandwiches. As the tea starts to pour, it's clear that trouble is brewing with a wickedly funny blend of jealousy, infidelity and barely concealed loathing. Tension starts to boil and maybe Colin isn't the one who needs help... with friends like these, who needs enemies?
Directed by the critically-acclaimed Jeremy Herrin, Absent Friends stars an astonishing cast of comedy talent from the worlds of stage, TV and film: David Armand (The Armstrong and Miller Show), Elizabeth Berrington (In Bruges, Waterloo Road), Katherine Parkinson (The IT Crowd, Season's Greetings), Steffan Rhodri (Gavin and Stacey), Reece Shearsmith (The League of Gentlemen, Betty Blue Eyes) and Kara Tointon (Pygmalion, EastEnders, Strictly Come Dancing Winner 2010).
A major West End revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends opened last night (9 February, previews from 26 January 2012) at the Harold Pinter Theatre.
The play is set at a dismal tea party attended by unhappily married couples hoping to console an old friend whose fiancée (who they've never met) has just passed away. The party progresses while the middle-aged friends reveal the misery and failure of their own relationships. As it turns out, the mourning guest of honour becomes the one responsible for comforting everyone else.
“The former Comedy Theatre is an appropriate venue for Absent Friends, a 1974 play that is not so much funny as cruel, disconcerting and, well, rather Harold Pinter in a suburban sort of way. The old Richard Briers role of the bereaved Colin … is wonderfully well taken by the blinking, bespectacled Reece Shearsmith … It’s a very funny turn, stylistically abrasive against Ayckbourn’s writing but persuasive on its own terms … Shearsmith thinks he’s playing a funny role, and sports a vaguely Northern comic accent to prove it. This is very different from Briers being the Home Counties fellow himself, indomitably cheerful and impervious to the bubbling discontent around him … The ordinariness of Ayckbourn is here sliding into the more pointed, knowing, satirical playing in a Mike Leigh piece. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but it creates a very different frisson around the work … Jeremy Herrin’s production – wittily designed and beautifully lit – keeps the static stage picture animated … The play always seemed remarkable and uncompromising. It still does: Shearsmith is sheer delight, as he was in Betty Blue Eyes, and David Armand makes bearded boringness attractive, though he overdoes the arbitrarily switched-on finger-clicking mannerism and needs to ditch the wayward, sticky-out wig instanter.”
“This is not Ayckbourn in trouserless ha-ha farce mode. It is thoughtful, melancholy, in places intentionally slow, the humour restrained … The play depicts nostalgia, lovelessness, social awkwardness and more in a detached, middle-class English house of the early Seventies. It finishes in a daringly downbeat fashion, the tick of a clock starting to fill the air … You may file out of the theatre in silent contemplation rather than whooping … Jeremy Herrin’s production takes a while to reach cruising altitude. It does so only with a scene when marital discord is breaking out between various miserable husbands and wives, and Marge is on the phone to bed-bound Gordon. The acting is spot-on. Reece Shearsmith’s Colin, so sweetly upbeat that he is maddening, reminded me at moments of Ronnie Corbett. Katherine Parkinson is perfect as daffy, depressed Diana who eventually has a hog-whimpering nervous collapse, gasping her fantasy of joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Kara Tointon’s Evelyn supplies catty glamour, and the way Elizabeth Berrington plays Marge made me think of Alison Steadman. Top work from Miss Berrington … The set is a (well-executed) horror of Seventies décor.”
“Alan Ayckbourn likes to tell the story of the woman who came up to him after a performance of one of his darker comedies and told him ‘If I’d known what I was laughing at I wouldn’t have started laughing at all.’ And that was certainly my feeling on emerging from Jeremy Herrin’s superb revival of Absent Friends (1974) one of the bleakest of all Ayckbourn’s plays. Though there are often hilarious scenes of social embarrassment, it is the emotional wasteland most of the characters inhabit that lingers in the memory … There are some wonderful moments of black comedy, especially when Elizabeth Berrington’s gauche Marge remarks that though she doesn’t like her tea strong, she doesn’t want it drowned. But the overriding impression is of pain and festering marital resentments, with the men as the clear villains of the piece … Katherine Parkinson is particularly fine as the nervy hostess of this macabre tea party, Kara Tointon is almost equally good as the sulky slut who has rogered Parkinson’s vile husband on the back seat of his car … Reece Shearsmith hilariously captures the insufferably smug good cheer of Colin, using his bereavement as an excuse to offer crass advice to friends who never really cared for him, and there are many moments in Absent Friends when it becomes physically impossible to stop laughing. But it wasn’t just a fresh fall of snow that made me shiver as I left the theatre. It was the sense of blighted lives and the transience of the heart’s affections.”
“Jeremy Herrin is bang on the money with the revival of this much less familiar piece from 1974. There are times when you are caught between laughter and tears ... Any budding dramatist could learn a vast amount from the economy and skill with which Ayckbourn sets up the situation. But his craftsmanship and the laughter it generates almost camouflage the acute social observation … The pivotal figure is Diana, whom Katherine Parkinson superbly endows with a quality of slowly erupting despair … But all the performances in this production are finely judged. Kara Tointon has just the right broodiness as the edgy Evelyn, who is like a comic version of the young mother in Edward Bond's Saved. Elizabeth Berrington's Marge meanwhile uses relentless busyness to conceal her own sadness in not having children ... And the men, however impossible, are equally well played. Steffan Rhodri's Paul is the archetypal Ayckbourn male bully, David Armand as the cuckolded John is all restless, arm-waving energy, and Reece Shearsmith as Colin has the bright-eyed bounciness of the truly insensitive … Because Ayckbourn is always there, and because he has written some 75 plays, we tend to take him for granted. But this play, in which the action takes place in real time, displays not only his technical adroitness but his psychological understanding of the havoc created by the happily well-meaning.”
“It’s not just the trim phone, the G-plan furniture and the platter of uneaten cheesy pineapples that tell us we’re back in the seventies in Alan Ayckbourn’s two-act tragi-comedy. It’s also the emotional constipation. Ayckbourn’s mean-minded caricatures have always been too one-dimensional for my liking and Jeremy Herrin’s revival leaves me as baffled as ever by the audience’s insistence on chuckling at every line, however mundane … But I also remain unconvinced about his ear for how real people speak and his basic stage mechanics. In dramas that rely on getting people in and out of rooms to maximise embarrassment or conflict he is never much good at giving them reasons to come and go. As the only two characters with any heart, Parkinson and Shearsmith give warm, energetic performances that glue the evening together … Elizabeth Berrington is daffy and occasionally withering as unhappy Marge, doomed to put her foot in it, while Steffan Rhodri and David Armand do their best with a pair of colourless husbands, one charmless, the other fidgety … But Kara Tointon looks even more bored than the role requires as Evelyn … this production does nothing to alter my view that more craft, less rush to move on to the next one, plus a greater generosity of spirit would have served him a lot better.”
“This 1974 portrait of a desperate hostess, her mean husband and their so-called friends is played out in agonising real time. It begins as kitsch sitcom. But its precision, understanding and deepening awfulness help it erupt emotionally beyond its genre boundaries, mingling laughter and tears … An exceptional cast makes the tragedy and comedy equally visible, in a grimly polished '70s lounge-play that's a bit like a theatrical version of 'shag, marry or kill' … Two of the men (Steffan Rhodri's shagging, bullying Paul and David Armand's fidgety, unscrupulous John) are so repulsive that you want to rush onstage with pepper spray. Paul's wife Diana, the outstanding Katherine Parkinson, does her best with a jug of cream … and is central, tragic and very moving. In a night of ridiculously detailed flair, Shearsmith's Colin, a Candide in knitting-pattern clothing, takes the comedy prize, with special mention to Elizabeth Berrington's Marge, forever on the phone to her obese hypochondriac husband … But Jeremy Herrin's intelligent, sensitive production rounds them all out. It achieves the feat of taking Ayckbourn's female characters seriously without losing the fun.”
“Absent Friends makes grief funny - a rare feat. And although Alan Ayckbourn's 1974 play is a period piece, its sharp understanding of psychology feels up-to-date … What starts as an exercise in consolation turns into a truly excruciating occasion, played out in the confines of a suburban sitting room. A superbly detailed design by Tom Scutt evokes the Seventies in all its polyester ghastliness … Diana is the most tragic character, and Katherine Parkinson's performance is soulful. Her sad personal history could have been depicted by Chekhov; although her role is the most physically demonstrative (thanks in part to some business with a cream jug), it's also the one with the densest subtext … Jeremy Herrin's meticulous direction ensures that every last scintilla of comedy is extracted from Ayckbourn's script. Although this isn't the most complex of pieces, Herrin finds layers of desolation in it. The result is a fine blend of the comic and the painful.”
“The clothes and decor here (from clunky plaform shoes to radial sun clocks) situate the piece very firmly in the 1970s ... The play opens with the bleak hilarity of a sequence in which the main hostess Diana (excellent Katherine Parkinson speaking with a built-in chuckle to the voice that seems be incubating a violent breakdown) rabbits on in a near-monologue about her inadequacies and her husband's infidelities. It's semaphored too loudly in this production that she is trying to bounce an adulterous confession from Kara Tointon's gum-chewing affectless Evelyn ... Wonderful Elizabeth Berrington plays childless Marge, the last of the trio has transferred her maternal affections to a mountainous, permanently invalid and disaster-prone husband who keeps ringing from his sick bed … Full of amusing gaffes that demonstrate our nervousness about death, the play is weakened by a back story that does not, to my mind, add up and by the stereotypical nature of the characters. But Reece Shearsmith … is in glorious form as Colin, all bouncy born-again brightness and car-crash concern and beautifully hinting just before his final exit that all is not as well with him as he makes out. ”
The former Comedy Theatre is an appropriate venue for Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends, a 1974 play – the very first of his bleaker mini-masterpieces - that is not so much funny as cruel, disconcerting and, well, rather Harold Pinter in a suburban sort of way.
The old Richard Briers role of the bereaved Colin, who turns up for a tea party organised by misguidedly sympathetic friends, is wonderfully well taken by the blinking, bespectacled Reece Shearsmith, wearing a beige jacket and plum-coloured trousers that are too long and too baggy for him.
It’s a very funny turn, stylistically abrasive against Ayckbourn’s writing but persuasive on its own terms. There’s a new wave of Ayckbourn performance, signalled by the National’s Season’s Greetings with Mark Gatiss and Catherine Tate, as well as this show’s brilliant Katherine Parkinson, which challenges a more traditional, perhaps cosier, kind of comedy character acting.
Shearsmith thinks he’s playing a funny role, and sports a vaguely Northern comic accent to prove it. This is very different from Briers being the Home Counties fellow himself, indomitably cheerful and impervious to the bubbling discontent around him.
The ordinariness of Ayckbourn is here sliding into the more pointed, knowing, satirical playing in a Mike Leigh piece. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but it creates a very different frisson around the work.
Colin’s hosts, Steffan Rhodri’s bluff supplies executive Paul and Parkinson’s fragile, suspicious Diana, are played with a comic edge that slightly undermines their innate vulnerability.
Paul is having a sordid affair (“like a sack of cement; no worse than with my husband”), with Kara Tointon’s brutally indifferent Evelyn, who wheels her baby on and off in his pram and otherwise simply sits sullenly chewing gum and flicking through magazines.
And Elizabeth Berrington’s childless fusspot, Marge – in occasional telephone contact with an obese husband at home, a fire prevention officer who’s burst his own hot water bottle – signals the rising tide of embarrassment by pretending everything’s just fine.
The group of friends haven’t seen Colin for three years, in which time he’s found and lost (she drowned) the love of his life. His radiant happiness in bereavement lights up the misery in this vale of tears the others are still going through.
Jeremy Herrin’s production – wittily designed in period by Tom Scutt (Evelyn lolls on a Parker Knoll leatherette sofa chair for most of the duration) and beautifully lit by Peter Mumford – keeps the static stage picture animated, climaxing in Diana’s desperate and hilarious outburst about wishing she’d been a Canadian Mountie before she pours a jug of cream over her husband’s head.
The play always seemed remarkable and uncompromising. It still does: Shearsmith is sheer delight, as he was in Betty Blue Eyes, and David Armand makes bearded boringness attractive, though he overdoes the arbitrarily switched-on finger-clicking mannerism and needs to ditch the wayward, sticky-out wig instanter.
It's certainly no surprise that the glowing reviews come from those who fondly remember the 70s, as that's where this is stuck. Not really for those who are not from that era. I think very few young(ish), casual theatre go-ers will enjoy this. From a 30s view-point, i found it to be slow, featuring one dimensional characters, displaying an out of date humour, which not even better acting could save. - Steven
02 Apr 12
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4* (what's gone wrong with the star ratings?)
Ayckbourn has been compared to Chekhov but the most obvious parallel for Absent Friends is with Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party. Katherine Parkinson is superbly irritating as the increasingly desperate and desolate hostess whose plans for a tea party for a recently bereaved friend gradually collapse around her amidst accusations of adultery, hypochondriac partners and seething rage between couples. There is no weak link in a terrific ensemble but the relatively inexperienced Kara Tointon is particularly good. She has been cast against type as the stroppy and sardonic Evelyn, although anyone would react like that in such exasperating company. The only problem is that, despite horrifically accurate 70's fashion and hairstyle, Kara is too adorably gorgeous to have married the idiotic John or romped with Stefan Rhodri's unappealing Paul. Jeremy Herrin has directed some exceptional productions, including The Heretic, but some of his most recent work has been less successful. In this case, although he has captured the darker elements of Ayckbourn's play, he hasn't fully exploited the comedy. There was little of the helpless laughter that should come with Ayckbourn despite the awfulness of the situations he portrays, but nevertheless the quality of the dramatic set-up and characterisation shines through despite Herrin's rather pedestrian production.
- David Baxter
01 Mar 12
This is a terrific production of a terrific play, sad and funny. Ayckbourn is at his bleakest, in his depiction of relationships, none of which offer any apparent comfort or joy. Kara Tointon and Reese Shearsmith are the standout funny performers here, making the most of their characters, who are the polar opposites of each other. Tointon's character, Evelyn, is the mouthpiece for Ayckbourn's own bleak take on relationships. She says little because she realises talking gets you nowhere, and when she does talk, it is with the cutting precision of truth (within the context of Ayckbourn's despairing play). Tointon takes Evelyn's humourlessness, and turns it into honesty, and her timing is impeccable. This is the best I have seen her, much better than in Pygmalion (where the shadow of Michelle Dockery's recent more nuanced performance still lingered). Kara Tointon has funny bones! So has Reese Shearsmith as Colin, the insular contrary deluded optimist, who brings his deluded upbeat views to play on the misery of the others. Everything he says contradicts the views of the play, and Shearsmith delightfully counterpoints everything that the play is about, in a needling irritating know-it-all way that made me laugh out loud. The 4 other characters in the play are also wonderfully performed, but they are not funny, rather they are desperate portrayals of the failure of human beings to relate. Katherine Parkinson, in particular, cheerily teeters effectively on the edge of emotional breakdown. The production design is convincingly seventies, the direction effective at foregrounding the drama. Ayckbourn's stature is destined to rise and rise as his lesser known works are rediscovered. - steveatplays
15 Feb 12
Brilliant cast in a brilliant production. The direction & design superb. The play's emotional truth & bleak intentions beneath the laughs are beautifully played by the great cast. Comedy often does come out of deeply tragic circumstances. This production does NOT play them for laughs (some of Cassox's comments regarding the production are horribly patronising. Have to say that his shrill review is happily at odds with the overwhelming majority of critics & those here) The drama & comedy are interwined & the characters' emotions delicately, subtlely portrayed (Reece Shearsmith & Katherine Parkinson in particular are outstanding) It is darkly funny & in the end deeply moving comic drama. Memorably & hilariously bleak piece of theatre. - Scarlet
15 Feb 12
Great Theatre and such an entertaining play and of course I think most have us have been in situations like this with friends. It was both tragic and comical and how hard it is to try and avoid a topic you feel you should not bring up--doesn't work, you bring it up all the more. Superb Cast as nice to see Reece Shearsmith on stage after the great Betty Blue Eyes (why that came off I will never know). The best lines are delivered by Katharine Parkinson and Elizabeth Berrington who are both great in this. Kara Tointon is the one with the least to say but every time she says something she does it brilliantly. Nice to see the theatre full and the audience were in raptures. Great play - Joe Spiteri
14 Feb 12
Happily -"Cassox" strangely bitter comments are completely cancelled out in the knowledge a) nobody else thinks its that bad and b) the author himself is very, very happy with this rendering of his work. Nothing else matters in the face of that. You can dislike it - but you can't say the play is good but this version is bad, when Ayckbourn himself has given it his blessing. I found it thoroughly engaging and all the performances riveting. - Lawrence55
12 Feb 12
That "Parker Knoll leatherette sofa chair" certainly looked like an Eames to me too. - David
11 Feb 12
If Henry Hitchen's Review in the evening standard was true, it would be a great show. However this is an awful production of an interesting play. It's played for laughs, not drama, and when you have a play where the comedy comes out of the deeply tragic circumstances, that is unforgivable. Most churn out the same-old-same-old (small whiny voiced Parkinson.... pick any of her previous performances for reference.... I'm the comedy Northerner Shearsmith... again... any previous performance) but Tointon stands out as being... well.. actually quite good. Horrible design by Schutt and horrible direction by Herrin.... it was as if the actors got the scripts two days in advance, asked to learn it, put in 'hilarious' 70's frocks, then asked to just do some acting for an audience. It's not terrible, but you'd be better off seeing something else. - Cassox
10 Feb 12
loved it. Shearsmith hilarious and tragic. You can't help but sit and see elements of your own life being charicatured. Go and see it. You'll love it. - Henry Weiss
10 Feb 12
Expected it to be old fashened but it was a crisp and witty production and I loved every minute. Shearsmith seemed to be inspired by Griff Rhys Jones and was clearly the star of the production with an outstanding support - Elisabeth
Opened 15 Oct 1881, designed by Thomas Verity and originally gas lit. 780 seats. An Ambassadors theatre since 2000 and renamed The Harold Pinter Theatre in September 2011 in recognition of the wide range of Pinter's plays that the theatre has hosted.
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