Joking Apart

Synopsis

Richard and Anthea are an ideal couple. Attractive, charming, successful in business, loving parents and most generous of hosts. Who can't help loving them? Who, secretly can't help envying them? But such beautiful people can be dangerous. As their friends, neighbours and business partners discover when, like moths around a candle, they are fatally attracted to this fascinating but ultimately destructive flame.

Our Review:

22 July 2002

In the late 1970s, to be a character in an Alan Ayckbourn play was to inhabit a distinctly unhealthy landscape. This was the period when his Scarborough theatre changed from being a summer season venue for holidaymakers to become a year-round operation, a move which gave rise to his first "winter plays". Instead of being written in the late spring for summer, these were written in December "whilst the North Sea storms hurtled round the house, slates cascaded from the roof and metal chimney cowlings were bounced off parked cars below my window. Not surprisingly, the result was a rather sad...play." Sad, indeed, involving a coronary and a total emotional breakdown. Not exactly the stuff of great comedy.

Joking Apart upset its author deeply by failing to play for any appreciable time in the West End in 1979, but frankly it isn't too hard to see why. The premise is that we have, to quote the programme note, "an ideal, balanced, happy couple" who act as a catalys...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 6 August 2002:

Pointless but some worthwhile acting...

Read more and add your own review