Absurd Person Singular

Synopsis

Sidney and Jane are on their way up, Eva and Geoff are on their way out and the Brewster-Wrights are on their way down. Taking turns to host the annual gathering, the three couples get more festivity than they bargained for, as drink begins to flow faster than chatter and the reluctant revellers collide across the lino in agonisingly funny encounters. Alan Ayckbourn stirs up increasingly explosive cocktails of love and loneliness, as each party provides more biting comedy that the last with the kitchen becoming a hotbed of marital mayhem and domestic disarray.

Our Review:

15 August 2012

It's 40 years since this play, Alan Ayckbourn's first major work, premiered, and elements of it already seem as outdated as a Victorian melodrama.

Social-climbing couples keen to throw a cocktail party to impress a bank manager (remember them?) and so secure funding for his business is a staple of 70s sitcom. As such, many of the jokes are telegraphed: If there's a fly-spray, it's going to squirted, a door left ajar will be slammed shut and so on. There's plenty of slapstick and it's not exactly subtle.

Ayckbourn does well with the play's tripartite structure, where each third takes place in the home of the three couples: the ambitious Hopcrofts, the warring Jacksons and the solidly respectable Brewster-Wrights. And if the play starts off as threatening as an early evening slab of light entertainment, by the middle third it enters darker territory. It's hard to think of many writers who hav...

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Latest User Review

jeremyb - 30 August 2012:

Usual cringeworthy examination of lower class angst. Abigail's Party makes me squirm with embarasssment and this is almost as bad in the first act. The second act dealing with abortive attempted suicide is very very funny but the third act is just cruel....

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