Life & Beth (Scarborough)
Alan Ayckbourn’s 71st play, performed in his own production at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, is not one of his most memorable or most thought-provoking, but it is cleverly structured and consistently entertaining, with a nice wry awareness of life’s little ironies.
Life and Beth rounds off the trio of ghost plays at Scarborough and is the least substantial and least chilling: though the ghost’s appearance at the end of Act 1 is dramatically handled, he proves a cosy, if irritating, spirit and potential suspense is dissipated by the appearance of the dead man’s name in the cast list!
The play takes place on the first Christmas after Gordon’s death. Everyone is convinced that Beth depended totally on him; no one notices that, after the immediate grief, widowhood provides a sense of release after 33 years of never being listened to. So, in a beautifully paced opening, Gordon’s sister Connie restlessly segues from Beth’s supposed adoration of Gordon into her own deprivation as his neglected sibling while Beth replies with matter-of-fact monosyllables and tries to listen to the carols on the television.
Then son Martin introduces tense, terrified girlfriend Ella and an expressed desire to take his father’s place, even to the extent of getting the lights working on the flashing Santa. When Gordon the ghost appears, he turns out to be the sort of chap who gives Health and Safety Inspectors a bad name.
Life and Beth is an extremely likeable play, but one that uses clichés where the best of Ayckbourn subverts them. We are reminded of television sit-coms when poor Ella (Ruth Gibson) literally never speaks and her vaunted culinary skills lead to a succession of crashes from the off-stage kitchen, when the vicar (Ian Hogg) proves an ineffectual, potentially amorous bungler, or even when the tree lights fuse the whole system.
Lisa Goddard, with the only three-dimensional character, is both very funny and absolutely convincing as Beth, self-effacing, sensible, trying to convince her family of her own self-sufficiency. Susie Blake’s neurotic Connie has the makings of a comic tour de force, but disappears in an off-stage descent into drunkenness before reviving to a sickly repentance that finally snaps Beth’s self-control, already severely tested by Adrian McLoughlin’s gloriously smug Gordon and Richard Stacey’s Martin, an infuriatingly accurate re-creation of his father.
Pip Leckenby’s living room set is appropriately conventional, though the oddity of the kitchen hatch and the kitchen door being in opposite directions is mildly distracting, and the production moves with all Ayckbourn’s deceptive ease.
– Ron Simpson
