Private Fears in Public Places

Synopsis

"...my heart used to leap about and sing. It really did. At the thought of seeing you after two - three months. It did what they say it does. It literally leapt. But coming here to meet you today, it sort of sank. I'm sorry. It did..." Six people, six separate lives - yet all strangely linked by circumstance. Does Nicola still love Dan? Can Stewart be on the verge of an office romance? Will Imogen ever find true love? Does Ambrose have a secret life? And what on earth is Charlotte up to?

Our Review:

9 May 2005

En route for a stint in an upcoming `Brits Off Broadway season' it's hard to imagine what New Yorkers are going to make of Alan Ayckbourn's latest. Why are we Brits so uptight about sex?

As the UK's most commercially successful playwright, Ayckbourn, consistently the keenest of observers about our strange repressed ways, has often produced plays that seem to fit into that very peculiarly English form of `No Sex Please We're British' sex comedies (recently spotted on the billboard of a radical theatre in Krakow!). Underneath however, something nasty is stirring in the woodshed.

Private Fears in Public Places is no exception. Talking in the programme (for this 50th anniversary Stephen Joseph Theatre Company production) of his original love of cinema, Ayckbourn takes six fairly nondescript individuals – an estate agent, his sister and his female office colleague, an elderly hotel bar-tender and a squabbling, upper middle class couple – and pushes them...

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Latest User Review

194.217.194.138) - 19 May 2005:

Saw the play on the 19th May and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was well produced, impressively acted by the whole cast and both funny and moving. I have seen so much rubbish recently that it was a delight to see that the theatre can still be this good. ...

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