Admit it, Mr Ayckbourn, you’re a bit of a Leftie at heart
ALTHOUGH playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn claims to be non-political — he has apparently voted but once in his life — this may be less than the full truth. He recently signed that dreadful petition of self-important puddings seeking to muzzle the free press; and his 1987 play A Small Family Business is seen as an attack on the excesses of high-pomp Thatcherism.
On the surface, the play is routine Ayckbourn, giving us British suburbia and its bottled urges. The characters are called Jack and Ken, Tina and Roy and so forth.
Jack McCracken has been asked to r un his f ather- i n- l aw’s f urniture company. He declares a belief in trust and honesty. Look after the paperclips and the profits will follow. Morality. Decency. Family values.
Sir Alan understands British moral self- delusion. Jack’s relations are less than entirely upstanding. When a private detective threatens to report his teenage daughter for shoplifting, family man Jack caves in to his wife’s emotional pressure and does a deal with the blackmailer. There starts the slippery descent into darkness.
By the end, this cuddly businessman i s as ruthless as an Italian mafia godfather. Even his hairstyle has changed. In the eyes of the Leftists at the National, that says it all about Thatcherism.
The production by Adam Penford is lavishly staged and acted wit h strong comic intent. The McCrackens’ Barratt-style home becomes a generic middle- class house, symbol of bland and anonymous comfort.
We could be in any wellheeled town in the mid-1980s, though the era is not sharply defined.
Some of the clothes are more Seventies t han Eighties, though one or two of the NIGEL women’s dresses have fantastic shoulder pads.
Lindsay is terrific as Jack and he is well supported by Debra Gillett as his trusting wife. Matthew Cottle is a superbly obsequious blackmailer.
Messrs Cottle and Lindsay, and perhaps Niky Wardley as Jack’s amoral, fetishistic sister- in- law, give performances which deserve to be remembered in t he next annual acting awards.
I was less sure about Alice Sykes’s teenager, who seems to belong to a more recent decade.
Yet the Ayckbournia has dated. On- stage freezes, while the action moves to a different part of the house, may once have been a dramatic innovation but are now terribly clunky.
References to a barrow-boy Porsche, a Spanish housing complex and a whizzo-new CD player are not yet antique enough to acquire charm. They just feel mouldy. The charac- terisation is two-dimensional and I was struck by the prosaic nature of the language.
Sir Alan may be reflecting accurately the small talk of Eighties’ suburbia and there is probably social- reportage value in that, but if a play is going to reach for a bigger political message — and persuade us of its moral timelessness — it needs to l eave a greater impression linguistically.
This show makes for an easy and enjoyable evening but it is no more than that.
A SMALL Family Business is broadcast live in cinemas on June 12. For more information and venues, visit ntlive.com THE West End’s Apollo Theatre had its official reopening this week, less than four months since the ceiling collapsed, injuring 80 theatregoers. The old place looks pretty spick and trim. The reopening show is a vampire story which has you leaping out of your skin in a couple of places.
This National Theatre Of Scotland production, a Jack Thorne adaptation of a Scandinavian novel, is coolly staged but slow to ignite. The ground is covered with snow and the backdrop is birch trees.
Vampire Eli (Rebecca Benson) needs human blood to keep up her sugar levels. The police are becoming twitchy about the number of drained corpses they keep finding.
Miss Benson uses a disconcertingly atonal voice to suggest the vampire’s otherworldliness. Eli being cold-blooded, she walks through the snow in bare feet and never wears a coat. Her face is pale but director John Tiffany resists any temptation to give her fangs.
Shy teenager Oskar (a charming turn by Martin Quinn) meets ageless Eli and the two form a bond. Perhaps she can help him face the boys at school who bully him.
Though I dislike vampire stories, this one is slickly done, director John Tiffany engineering coups de theatre amid threatening chords of gloom music. The back of my neck prickled when we had the sound of a big cat purring when Eli was about to get stuck into another juicy neck.
Yet it was hard not to laugh when Eli, blood dripping from her chops, said: ‘I’m not sure I’m very good for you, Oskar.’ A show for college-age Goths, perhaps.