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:

13 May 2011

One of Alan Ayckbourn’s acknowledged classics, Absurd Person Singular gets a solidly entertaining outing with a distinctly political undertone in this Curve production.

Set around the time of its writing – somewhere in the early 70s – Paul Kerryson’s meticulously designed version leans heavily on the notion (easy with hindsight) that Ayckbourn’s 1972 play predicted the approach of Thatcherism and all its concomitant implications: the rise of the little man, the triumph of selfishness over altruism and the glorification of the self-made man.

So the show begins with a giant black-and-white photograph of the Blessed Margaret doing the dishes, which heralds both the political message and the relentless domesticity of the farce that is to come. Three kitchens, three successive Christmases, three couples whose fortunes wax and wane with the passing of the years. The craft of Ayckbourn’s writing is joyously explored and equally joyously played by the cast of six, who relish ...

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