Preview Bedroom Farce

Sir Alan Ayckbourn's non-farcical farce comes to the WYP

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Preview: Bedroom Farce

It might seem careless for a man who writes plays for the fluid but finite spaces that are theatres in the round, to pen one that demands the presence of three beds onstage simultaneously. So was Sir Alan Ayckbourn having an off day when he wrote Bedroom Farce in 1975? Did the imaginative current of his vision flatten his usually shrewd sense of dramatic practicality?

Nope. Although the play was first performed in Scarborough, it was produced on a roomier thrust stage. Bedroom Farce only reached Ayckbourn’s favoured format when he revived it in 2000 at Stephen Joseph Theatre, of which he was artistic director until this season. Moreover, he wrote it for the National Theatre’s Lyttleton, which has a proscenium arch stage that he inspected beforehand.

This may explain why West Yorkshire Playhouse artistic director Ian Brown chose this play, rather than one of Ayckbourn’s 71 others, for a house production in the Courtyard Theatre this summer. One imagines that Brown’s decision to produce an Ayckbourn play at this juncture implies a tribute to the latter’s triumphant reign at the SJT, and he may have been attracted to Bedroom Farce because it was written for a larger space, as opposed to having been successfully inflated for one previously (which is the case with many others). Indeed, director Tamara Harvey commented that its stage’s suitability consists largely in its ability to accommodate three beds tidily.

Whereas the play’s logistics explain the first half of its title, there’s much less to justify the second (although simply calling a play Bedroom might encourage the misconception that it aims to entertain a niche market in the Richard Timney mould). Bedroom Farce, Ayckbourn has said, is not a farce, despite revolving around events that most of us would consider farcical if they were to happen in our everyday lives. The plot’s pivot is a houseparty that becomes acrimonious, leaving four couples all intending to sleep in a house offering only three beds. As this suggests, the play is a typical Ayckbourn, one in the senses that it is a comedy of circumstance, rather than a flurry of punch lines of which Ricky Hatton would be proud, and that it exposes and dissects the pimpled underbellies of characters’ marriages.

The production not only represents Harvey’s WYP debut, but her first production of an Ayckbourn play. However, she directed three short plays, Purvis, Storm in a Tea Chest and The Prodigal Son, and a full length one, Touch Wood, at the SJT in 2006 and 2007, toward the end of Ayckbourn’s tenure there. Furthermore, that she has had three nominations for What’s On Stage Theatregoers’ Choice or Olivier awards for her comedies - of which one brought her a victory - indicates that her handling of the genre is agile. Her cast includes Denise Black (‘Coronation Street’, ‘Queer as Folk’) and Niky Wardley, who you may recall as Jeremy’s dishy but despotic manager Cally in the fifth series of ‘Peep Show’.
Until 4 July, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Playhouse Square, LS2 7UP, 0113 213 7800, 7.45pm, £15-25

Posted on Monday 15th June 2009
SW

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