Alan Ayckbourn is the poet laureate of missed connections. In play after pensive, droll and acid play, Ayckbourn anatomizes how we fail to understand and trust our lovers and friends. In a repertory of two Ayckbourn plays spanning more than 40 years – Confusions from 1974 and Hero’s Welcome from 2015 – at 59E59 Theaters, characters orbit one other (at home, at work, in the garden, in the park), but only rarely land on the same intellectual or emotional plane.
Confusions is a series of five one-acts designed to be performed by five actors. Several of the vignettes are loosely interlinked; all are concerned with clashing wants and needs. The first follows a harried mother who infantilizes her nextdoor neighbors, the next finds her husband attempting a pick-up at a hotel bar; the third eavesdrops on two couples squabbling during a restaurant meal; the fourth, and finest, depicts a village fete gone terribly awry (electrocution is the least of it). The final one-act, set on a semi-circle of park benches and more absurdist in tone, shows each character half-desperate for empathy, but unwilling to extend it to anyone else.
Hero’s Welcome, which shares its cast with Confusions, with the charming addition of Evelyn Hoskins, feels somewhat less sturdily constructed – its mysteries are perhaps too easy to solve, some of its characterizations less nuanced than they might be. It concerns the return of Murray (Richard Stacey), a war hero back in the village he left 17 years earlier under a lowering cloud of arson, unplanned pregnancy and abandonment. He’s brought his bride, Baba (Hoskins), a young woman with a partial, tenacious grasp of the English language. Alice (Elizabeth Boag), his former fiancee and now the local mayor, and Brad (Stephen Billington), his former friend and now the local toff, are not best-pleased to see him.
Ayckbourn directs both plays, with a reliance on vivid performances, evocative costumes and cheap furnishings, with the exception of a cracking model train set, the obsession of Alice’s husband, Derek (Russell Dixon). The actors he has assembled are gutsy and supple. A couple of them (Billington, Charlotte Harwood) are inclined to overplay their parts, but this is clearly done with Ayckbourn’s encouragement and approval.
Though neither is a major work, each play is absorbing on its own. But what’s most interesting is the way both taken together show the persistence and evolution of Ayckbourn’s themes and interests. The refusal to understand one another is nearly as pointed in Hero’s Welcome as it is in the park bench scene, but the later play offers a quality rare in an Ayckbourn play: hope. Though the relationship between Baba and Murray is often threatened, Ayckbourn suggests that it will endure and offer a kind of salvation. “I’m here,” Baba whispers to Murray in the final scene. “I will be your hero.” Unusually for Ayckbourn, he believes it. So do we.
