Chris Eldon Lee reviews ‘Roundelay’, which is at the New Vic in Newcastle-Under-Lyme until Saturday 25th October 2014.
Alan Ayckbourn has balls….five of them…pulled one by one out of a bag, lottery-like, by an audience member at 6.45 each evening. This decides which order the five interchangeable acts of his latest courageous creation are to be played in. With 120 possible outcomes, the chances of you seeing the same show I saw are slight.
In any normal play the early scenes are seen without context – but provide the history for the later scenes. Drawn last on another night, those opening scenes would hold more meaning and get more laughs. In other words, by jumbling them up, the drama is transformed every night.
It’s a top rate idea and I admire Alan Ayckbourn as much for his nerve as for the proven, commensurate quality of his writing. But at the end of a fascinating evening, I felt strangely unfulfilled.
His latest theatrical foray presents us with 5 absolutely intriguing, almost Chekhovian, short stories with characters and connections flitting between them. They’re great sketches and all worthy of development into full-length plays.
They follow in the footsteps of Morecambe and Wise’s famous ‘Bing Bong’ scenarios. The doorbell rings, someone arrives, and something totally unexpected happens.
For example, a female theatrical agent (played by a suitably frazzled Sophie Roberts) is on the phone, setting up a first audition for a 16-year-old rising star. The door buzzes and a thuggish kidnapper arrives – only to be challenged by a pedantic CSI Crime-fanatic geek. Poor girl. Which fate is worse?
In the most farcical playlet a promiscuous politician is expecting a BBC film crew when the same truculent teenager turn up to audition. She’s got the wrong address and he’s got the wrong idea.
I won’t spoil them further, but they are all classic Aykbourn ideas.
The teenager by the way really is rising. Krystle Hylton (pictured) is a star in the making – brilliant, bolshie and full of elfish energy. She prances round the stage like a ninja, hilariously trying to perform her ‘Three Little Girls From School Are We’ audition piece to a pervert politician (the excellently belligerent Michael Hastings) intent on getting his trousers off.
Amongst the raucous language there is tenderness too. In a wonderfully sentimental idea, a call girl/actress (Brook Kinsella) is hired to seductively resemble the youthful, late wife of a High Court Judge (Russell Dixon). Corruption is in the air; but after the doorbell they tenderly tell each other about courting their lost loves; he in a high-class hotel, she in a chip shop. The scene is heart-rending.
It’s all tantalising stuff. And that’s the trouble. I realise I am judging Ayckbourn by his own soaring standards but I really wanted to know so much more. I yearned for more interweaving of the tales; closer correlations; to be challenged further by Mr A’s cleverly conceived device; to be made to work even harder.
It’s a night of high-quality, magic moments that Aykbourn fans won’t want to miss. But somehow, five tasty snacks don’t quite add up to a full meal.
Photo : Tony Bartholomew
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