Given that this is Alan Ayckbourn’s 79th play, it is hardly surprising that it has echoes from the past. Although Ayckbourn has dealt before with the destructiveness of the well-intentioned, the brutality of men and the tenacity of women, his new piece still takes one by surprise through its ruefully comic view of the human predicament.
This time the protagonist, Murray, genuinely is a hero: a decorated soldier who, having rescued children from a blazing building, returns after 17 years to his home town with his new foreign bride, Baba. Although Murray plans to settle and restore the fortunes of his family’s run-down hotel, his presence brings nothing but disaster.
Alice, the property-dealing mayor, is tormented by the memory of being jilted by Murray. Meanwhile Murray’s oldest friend, Brad, finds the ancient sexual rivalry between the two of them rising to the surface. Having been greeted as a returning hero, Murray becomes the unwitting cause of marital breakdown, mayhem and even murder.
The well-meaning destroyer is a familiar figure in drama, from Ibsen’s The Wild Duck to Ayckbourn’s own A Chorus of Disapproval. Murray is a disruptive presence, but he is far from being this play’s most fascinating figure. There is an even more naive blunderer in the shape of Alice’s husband, played with a brilliant fusspot concern by Russell Dixon. He is the model of anxious niceness, pours all his energy into a computerised model railway that runs through every room and is desperate to seem a bit of a lad. When the monstrous Brad lays bets as to his chances of seducing Murray’s wife, Mr Dixon emits sympathetic noises that are meant to signal unbridled lechery but actually suggest a seal in labour. The other compelling character is Baba, who shows a phenomenal capacity to grasp the idiosyncrasies of the English language and who actor Terenia Edwards, in an impressive debut, endows with a gutsy resilience that suggests Ayckbourn sees her as the true hero.
The ending, for a play that is so darkly comic, has a touch of sentimental uplift and, I suspect, in more expansive times Ayckbourn would have given us a larger cast list and greater signs of civic discord. But his talent for recording the wanton damage we do to each other, whether with a smiling face or a savage sneer as in the case of Brad, remains undiminished. His production is also well acted by Richard Stacey as the trouble-making Murray, Elizabeth Boag as the brooding mayor, Stephen Billington (no relation) as Brad and Emma Manton as his verbally abused wife, whose relationship is that of jailer and prisoner.
- At Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, until 3 October. Box office: 01723 370 541.
