Alan Ayckbourn's 70th play is a meditation on the unbridgeable gulf between men and women, continuing a theme developed throughout the previous 69. And, like many of his plays, it revolves around a central theatrical conceit - though in this case you wonder if it may be one bright idea too many.
In the first act, we find Mal and Jill Rodale staggering through the motions of a proto-typical Ayckbournian marriage - he's a boorish furniture salesman who leaves the toilet seat up; she's an oppressed housewife who scratches the car. Then one morning they wake up to find themselves inhabiting each other's bodies.
It is a trick employed for obvious comic potential, yet it seems unusually remiss of Ayckbourn to neglect to provide any valid reason for such a drastic personality transplant. Even something as simple as the couple getting out of different sides of the bed might explain it. Yet there's nothing apart from vague speculation about the intervention of aliens.
It is also baffling why Ayckbourn doesn't simply establish the body-swap business from the beginning. After all, if Franz Kafka had turned Gregor Samsa into a giant insect in chapter 20, you would miss the existentialist parable in bewilderment as to where such strange powers come from.
John Branwell and Lisa Goddard do everything required in terms of absorbing each other's physical characteristics, yet struggle to make the process seem more than an extended acting exercise. The couple's reconciliation at the end is heartening, yet can it really be Ayckbourn, the veteran correspondent from the sexual battlefield, signing off with the platitude that if only men could be a bit more like women, and women a bit more like men, the world would be a much happier place?
· Until November 11. Box office: 01723 370541.
