These days it’s possible to capture digital audio on any smartphone. Back in 1987 you needed access to one of the four Synclavier samplers in the country, which cost as much as a moderately sized house. Yet Alan Ayckbourn managed to get his hands on one, and the result was Henceforward, a bleak vision of the future in which everything you say may be recorded and used in evidence against you.
The play features Jerome, a slovenly electronic composer who lives off self-heating meals and has only a malfunctioning robot for company. What he needs is a perfect wife to convince his less-than-perfect estranged spouse that he can function as a responsible father to their adolescent daughter Geain (“Not Gaelic, just pretentious”).
It’s possibly the saddest and most disconcerting scenario Ayckbourn ever conceived, and can hardly be a comfortable one to revisit as it deals with the tendency of creative artists to alienate everyone around them. Bill Champion radiates an impervious sense of self-absorption as Jerome; and Laura Matthews, as the actor he hires to present a facade of domesticity, is suitably appalled to discover that every room has been wired for sound: “You’re a voyeur,” she exclaims. “No – you’re an auditeur, a listening Tom.”
Nothing dates quite as quickly as the near future however, and it is harder to be impressed by Jerome’s sampled compositions than it was 30 years ago. But in suggesting that our lives would become soundtracked by a barrage of gormless EDM, Henceforward has proved prophetic enough.
- At the Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, until 8 October. Box office 01723-370 541
