Lightness on the dark side

ABSENT FRIENDS, Coliseum, Oldham

THIS was, by general consent, the point at which comedy playwright Alan Ayckbourn joined the dark side.

After a string of almost 20 plays, some of them his most popular comedies, this one, in 1974, started his trend towards experimentation with mood, tragedy and the human condition, mostly with laughs.

As you might guess from the title, this one explores the ultimate taboo — death.

Well not death, exactly — the body lies cold long before the action of the play begins. This is a gathering of friends in support of estranged old pal Colin (David Crellin), to cheer him up and remind him life goes on, chin up, carry on...

Except his friends are in no position to give advice.

Colin’s girlfriend has drowned, despite which he delights in the brief and exultant memory of their time together. But bored young mum Evelyn and her annoyingly live-wire husband John can hardly speak a civil word to each other — and Evelyn has been having a brief affair with businessman Paul, husband of dowdy Diana. Other friend Marge has married a man who considers her little more than a skivvy.

The six come together for a dismal, brief afternoon of party sandwiches and cake, old photographs, patronising homilies about life and relationships and faux pas all round about death and drowning. Colin smarmily, but innocently, turns out to be the one who has lost least.

Steve Pinder is nicely world-weary and definitely hiding something as philanderer Paul, while Kerry Peers tries to keep her act together, and fails, as his wife and the party’s hostess.

Poppy Tierney is delightfully anti-social as Evelyn, while Dominic Gately annoys the hell out of everyone as fidgety John.

Samantha Giles is enjoyably mumsy as Marge while David Crellin pulls the whole thing together as Colin, innocently laying waste to his old friends with his lack of depression.

The original play was deliberately written to eke out those embarrassing silences at gatherings like these.

Director Nikolai Foster instead presents a sort of man’s-man version; quick, slightly overwrought, no-nonsense and probably funnier because of it.

Strangely, if you screw up your eyes a bit and use your imagination, this treatment makes the play look like something of an early run of Mike Leigh’s “Abigail’s Party”.