Time of My Life (Watford)
It’s well known that family celebrations often bring out the worst in people. Alan Ayckbourn’s 1992 play, now given a well deserved and extremely well staged new production by Brigid Larmour, fractures the surface bonhomie to blistering effect. We laugh a lot. We cringe even more.
Just as the action is jagged – and the characters’ relationships even more so – so the checked red and white floor cloths suggest that some sort of deadly game of snakes and ladders is unfolding. Marion Bailey makes Laura into the mother-in-law we would all hope to avoid, as she drips venom onto her children’s choice of partners and wraps herself in a carapace of selfishness. Paul Bentall, as Gerry offers us a beautifully paced portrait of a businessman confronting failures on one level too many.
Gregory Gudgeon is Calvinu and all his staff – quick changes which present a fully fleshed gallery of recognisable types and at least one real person. Hairdresser Maureen, who at first thinks Adam might be worth a bit of effort, gives Jessica Dickens a succession of ever more fantastic hairdos as well as eagerly seized opportunities to make a dramatic mark. Craig Fletcher has the right degree of understated weakness as Adam, a dreamer but never a doer.
Glyn, on the other hand, is definitely a doer, albeit one who over-reaches. Chris Kelham catches the brashness of the man precisely and one wanted to cheer when Anna O’Grady’s blonde mouse Stephanie blooms into the stylish, self-possessed and self-aware brunette so long subdued by the family into which she’s married. But there’s a lot of plot, revelations and counter-recriminations before we reach that moment. Some we see coming. Some just slide out to catch us unawares.
As I said, snakes and ladders. Ayckbourn is a master manipulator of these.
