Bedroom action — with no sex or sleeping

Reporter: Paul Genty
Date published: 05 February 2014


BEDROOM FARCE, Oldham Coliseum
YOU might rush to the idea that a play with this title has people slamming doors, running around with their pants round their ankles and indulging in various forms of hanky-panky, all at breakneck speed.

In which case, remember this is an Alan Ayckbourn comedy, not a Ray Cooney comedy.

There’s a clever Ayckbourn set-up: four couples and three bedrooms, all on stage at once. But as the playwright has said many times since the premiere in 1975, his object was to observe people in the bedroom, with no sex and not much sleeping...

And so it proves: Trevor’s parents Delia and Ernest (Lynette Edwards and Christopher Wilkinson) retire to bed for pilchards on toast after a disastrous anniversary meal; Nick and Jan (Robin Simpson and Maeve Larkin) are disrupted by terrible patient Nick’s enforced back-injury bed rest; Malcolm and Kate (Henry Devas and Catherine Kinsella) are throwing a party but spend most of their time solving crises from their bedroom, and Trevor and Susannah (Antony Eden and Laura Doddington) are the ones causing most of the crises - two self-absorbed dimwits whose being together at least means they won’t ruin two other lives. Well, at least in theory...

When Trevor and the neurotic Susannah ruin the party, she runs off to his parents, he tries his luck at old flame Jan’s, and through the night the pair wreak havoc in suburbia.

Nick, meanwhile, loses his book while Jan is at the party and in his agony falls on the floor, where he stays for the evening; Jan returns and there’s a lovely bit of physical comedy as she pulls him on top of her, immovably, as she tries to get him back into bed.

Shockingly bad DIY man Malcolm has decided to put together the flat-pack desk he got for his wife, which he of course makes a complete mess of. And so on.

Ayckbourn peppers his realistic drama of characters and crisis with enough comedy to keep us laughing — just enough that we don’t realise the sadness of it all.

Ayckbourn master Robin Herford directs a terrific cast on a cleverly-set stage and while at times I wished his pacing and lighting changes went a little quicker, it matched the measured sense of just-heightened reality throughout this comedy that’s not a farce.

(to February 22)