Preview Ayckbourn On Tour
The Yorkshire playwright is well represented across his home county this fortnight
Absent Friends (photo by Ian Tilton)
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Few things that are plugged in print really deserve their plaudits. The commodity in question might be excellent but, if so, this is purely coincidental: totally unrelated to the superlatives that it has collected like a giant fishing net.
However, one product that deserves to be spoken of as though it were a deity is Yorkshire Tea. It is the staple of any balanced diet, and a mug of it counts as at least six of your five a day. So, by association, the sort of theatre production that should be treated with the same blend of devoutness and tenderness would be one produced “in association” with the beverage.
Harrogate Theatre doesn’t produce the many shows, but the company that its latest one keeps atones somewhat for the scarcity of predecessors. Absent Friends was written by previous Leeds Guide interviewee Sir Alan Ayckbourn in 1974, and Harrogate’s production is a joint one with Oldham Coliseum, where it premiered last month, and Anvil Arts. It is directed by Nikolai Foster, who has previously worked at the Playhouse on Bollywood Jane (2007), Salonika and Animal Farm (both 2008).
The play is often construed as one of the junctions in Ayckbourn’s crowded canon, because it set his fare - good-natured comedy crafted from a reservoir of observations on the silliness of human behaviour - against a bleaker canvas than it had inhabited before. Shorn of its undulations, the plot is about a man whose friends hold a tea party to try to buoy him after his fiancée dies. This backfires twofold: not only is he coping remarkably well, but the tensions latent within the group surface, with results akin to the splitting of an atom. Returning briefly to the vein in which this article began, the Yorkshire Tea connection consists of a competition to win a hamper (regrettably the entry date has now elapsed, but the thought was so inspired that we couldn’t fail to mention it).
Oldham Coliseum is also touring to Ayckbourn’s former charge, the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough. (However, Absent Friends premiered in the converted library that preceded the company’s current home, which is a converted cinema.) Its version of And a Nightingale Sang by C P Taylor is a co-production with Newcastle-under-Lyme’s New Vic. It follows a family in Newcastle (not the suburb of Stoke, the one with the river and the beer and the football team), well before Michael Ashley did worse violence to the city’s temple than any JCB could wreak by renaming it sportsdirect.com@St James’ Park. Specifically, it’s set during World War Two, and is awash with wartime ditties.
Its director is Sarah Punshon, a graduate of the BBC Directors’ Academy, whose work on ‘EastEnders’, ‘Emmerdale’ and ‘Doctors’ is cited by the collaborating companies as evidence of her ability. However, we know of firmer proof. We interviewed Punshon as she was preparing the WYP’s first production of an unsolicited manuscript: Clare Brown’s desperately sad dramatisation of the lives of jazz pioneers Tony Jackson and Ferd “Jelly Roll” Morton, Don’t You Leave Me Here.
Absent Friends, 25 February - 13 March, Harrogate Theatre, Oxford Street, Harrogate, HG1 1QF, 01423 502 116, 7.30pm (Sat matinees 2.30pm, £11-£15
And a Nightingale Sang, 24 February - 6 March, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Westborough, Scarborough, YO 11 1JW, 01723 370 540, 7.30pm, £9-£19.50 (students £6)
Posted on Friday 5th February 2010
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