Alan Ayckbourn has always been a pragmatic writer, and the sole reason for creating Confusions was to keep his Scarborough company busy throughout the lean winter of 1974 – extremely busy, as it turned out, as he created a sequence of five, interlinked one-act plays in which a cast of five play more than 20 parts.
Ayckbourn’s original scheme has been diluted over the years, as subsequent productions have sought to redistribute the workload. But the joy of Ayckbourn’s revival – which he has redirected to mark the Stephen Joseph Theatre’s 60th anniversary is that it restores the harmony of the casting and thematic development.
In the first scene, we meet an exhausted single mum who has forfeited her grasp of adult conversation. In the second, her absentee husband fails to seduce a pair of uninterested women in a provincial hotel. The waiter eavesdropping on this debacle then goes on to overhear the collapsing marriage of a councillor’s wife, who next appears as guest of honour at a doomed church gala that becomes, in every sense, a fete worse than death.
The final play, in which five lonely strangers vie for four available spaces on a park bench, is the most enigmatic, and sometimes omitted on the basis that it spoils the fun. But Ayckbourn’s direction reveals this haunting diminuendo to be a critical part of the scheme: a form of verbal fugue in which all the preceding narratives are subtly entwined.
Thanks to an exceptional cast, the evening fulfils its original brief of a masterclass in comic acting. It creates the impression of an entire repertory season compacted into a couple of hours, as the five performers morph through a bewildering range of wigs, costumes and accents. More than a disparate five-finger exercise, Confusions becomes the middle-England equivalent of Schnitzler’s pass-the-pox satire La Ronde, in which only the laughter is infectious.
• Until 26 September. Box Office: 01723 370541. Details: sjt.uk.com
