Very funny - but sad too

Things we do for love

Lowry, Salford, to Saturday

ALAN Ayckbourn has seemingly long since given up on trying to create deliberately funny plays as this tragi-comedy from 1997 shows, the line between funny and sad is a very fine one and he constantly steps one side or the other.

This production of one of his best modern plays does him real justice, with a terrific set and top-notch cast featuring Aussie TV star Natalie Imbruglia in her first stage role.

The premise is fairly simple: no-nonsense spinster Barbara has a downstairs lodger, Gilbert, who is secretly obsessed with her.

She lets her upstairs flat to her old school friend, girly, needy Nikki and her boyfriend Hamish.

Barbara, the former school prefect, opinionated and with little in the way of self-censorship, is instantly disliked by the latter, a vegetarian oceanographer whose diet and nationality come in for rather a lot of friendly(ish) criticism.

That’s it: Ayckbourn winds up the four of them and lets them go, with one of his famous gimmick sets — we see the entirety of Barbara’s flat, plus the lowest 3ft or so of the flat above (so we can see mainly legs and anything taking place on the floor), and the upper couple of feet of Gilbert’s basement — so we can see that he is painting the ceiling, as it happens with a large nude picture of Barbara, not that she has ever been in there to find out.

Of course dislike turns to lust and over the course of a few weeks Hamish and Barbara start an affair, which means they have to tell Nikki, and have to cope with the guilt.

The set-up offers plenty of scope for painfully funny, or just painful, set pieces: Gilbert (Simon Gregor, a little extreme but mostly very funny) drunkenly making a fool of himself after being invited to dinner with the other three; Nikki (the excellent Imbruglia), post-revelation, cutting up Hamish’s clothes, and Hamish (Edward Bennett) and Barbara (Claire Price) — both terrific, coming to blows as their guilt temporarily takes over.

As the evening moves on you get the idea that Ayckbourn writes here without any great purpose in mind; the only conclusion you can draw from the play is that people do things for love that cancel out their propriety and honour, and that sometimes it’s hilarious, sometimes deeply sad, and sometimes both at the same time.