A trio of trickery

10 April 2012

Alan Ayckbourn's latest trilogy, Damsels in Distress, is like a series of great comedic equations, where each joke is plotted with strategic exactness and familiar comic devices are cheekily rearranged in the quest for the most ebulliently hilarious result.

Where a mathematician would deploy numbers and symbols, Ayckbourn explores the myriad potentials of comically misplaced forks, prone bodies and awkward sex, in three plays, each revealing mayhem whipped up in a chic Docklands flat.

Throughout a day that veers between the brilliant and the shoddily predictable, the same cast of seven actors changes its colours as often as a hyperactive chameleon. Ayckbourn originally wrote two plays, GamePlan and FlatSpin, for this "permanent" company, both to be staged on the same set - and then suddenly realised that his cunning economy of staging had given birth to a third idea, which he developed into RolePlay.

GamePlan lurches into action at 6am. A manic- depressive mother, gasping from one cigarette to another, bemoans her business's collapse and the disappearance of her husband. Her 16-year-old daughter Sorrel's combined desperation to help financially and her contempt for men leads to an all too obvious solution. With the help of the latest technology, in the form of the internet and mobile phones, she turns to the oldest profession in the world and sets up a prostitute's agency.

Some men I talked to in the interval expressed concern about the titillatory side-effects of a 16-year-old character appearing in a PVC corset, evanescent shorts and thigh-length boots. But, from my female perspective, it seemed that Saskia Butler's mature/naive, controlled performance both hilariously and tenderly satirised the ridiculous, deforming aspect of clothes created for male fantasies.

Her character, Sorrel, and her naive ninny of a best friend, Kelly - who becomes the maid - slip, slide, and trip around the set in hellish heels. As Kelly, the superb Alison Pargeter had several people in the audience weeping with laughter as she caricatured the nervous postures of an all-at-sea teenager, haplessly offering condoms like pre-dinner Pringles.

The issue here - in as far as Ayckbourn can be reduced to issues - is the tragedy of Sorrel's need to grow up too fast. Yet such moral debates are never clumsily spelled out, instead they become subsumed into the machine of comedy, which, like life, marches brutally on. Its next operation, FlatSpin, sees Pargeter blossom from dowdy nerd into the actor and bimbo with attitude, Rosie Seymore. The play is by far the weakest of this trilogy, not least because Seymore is sub-Bridget Jones, while her unconvincing romantic hero, Sam Berryman, is like substitute butter: cheap and slick, with a nasty aftertaste.

Ayckbourn's armoury of double-entendres, comic drunkenness, mono-brain-celled brute strength and name-swapping seems distinctly flabby in the context of the far-fetched plot, which sees secret agents set up a sting operation in the flat where

the unwitting Rosie holds her romantic dinner. The Italian food theme gives rise to endless sex-and-gnocchi jokes, while the surveillance cameras bring uninspired technological spice to the flailing plot.

Luckily, the comedy machine has hidden reserves, which come to the fore in RolePlay. Although lacking the emotional conviction of GamePlan, the drama brings humorous punch to a disastrous dinner party, where two people more bonded by romance than love introduce their respective parents to each other.

Here Ayckbourn's witty weapon is Jacqueline King's snobbishly alcoholic mother, who mixes her brandy with blisteringly uncomfortable truths. However this comedy-of-lack-of-manners is too caricatured for overall satisfaction, in a day where an old dog performs both ancient and new tricks with varying success.

RolePlay: Damsels In Distress

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