Having made it 80 not out this season, with the curious, semi-improvised spoof known as the Karaoke Theatre Company, Alan Ayckbourn has knocked out plays No 81 and 82 in pretty swift measure. Or maybe, as future scholars will argue, it’s actually play No 81 a and b, as Consuming Passions is actually two interlinked one-act pieces set, and designed to be performed in, a restaurant.
Short lunchtime entertainments have always been a feature of the Stephen Joseph theatre, often in the form of tryouts for emerging dramatists. (Tim Firth got his first start in the Scarborough bistro.) More recently, Ayckbourn has begun to tinker with the format himself, first with the double-hander known as Farcicals; now with this enigmatic pair of Hitchcockian miniatures, in which audiences enjoying a light lunch find themselves dining in the twilight zone.
Part one, which is entitled Premonitions, finds a rather anxious woman named Melanie sitting at a restaurant table, awaiting the arrival of her husband, who might as well be named Godot given the likelihood of his ever showing up. Eventually the waiter gets frustrated and seats a second couple at the table, who proceed to talk across Melanie as if she wasn’t there. It’s either astonishingly rude or incredibly weird, as you begin to wonder if the hapless, abandoned Melanie is not just socially invisible.
The plot thickens as the interlopers – a poised, Hitchcock blonde and her puppyish male admirer – begin conspiring to nudge the woman’s husband off the edge of a cliff. This leaves Melanie with only the 30-minute duration of the second play, Repercussions, to intercede and prevent the planned accident from taking place.
Though fairly slight, the plays are replete with Ayckbournian self-allusion. The two-part structure and conspiratorial air are reminiscent of The Revengers’ Comedies. The jolly waiter Aggi and his identical, bad-tempered brother Dinka were first seen charming/terrorising diners in Time of My Life. But most of all it draws from a similar source as Ayckbourn’s hallucinatory depiction of a mental breakdown from Woman in Mind.
As Melanie, Louise Shuttleworth has a bottled-up quality of suppressed emotion that suggests she’s on the brink of something unpleasant. Throughout the two plays she pulls off the commendable feat of appearing entirely plausible, while causing you to doubt the veracity of anything she says. It adds to the drama that the restaurant environment makes us complicit in her delusion. There’s a woman over there undergoing a complete meltdown – should we get involved or simply ignore her and have another sandwich? You can see the plays on their own and in potentially any order, though that would be a bit like ordering pudding before moving on to the main course. And though it’s far from Ayckbourn’s most substantial fare, it’s fairly appetising nonetheless.
- In repertoire at the Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, until 8 October. Box office: 01723 370541.
