1988 comedy, rarely revived because it requires a swimming pool on stage, is a savagely funny indictment of a society in which villainy is publicly rewarded and virtue quietly discarded. For good measure, Ayckbourn also satirises television's tendency to distort reality and manipulate truth to fit its own agenda.
His framework is the recording of a TV programme, Their Paths Crossed, which stages dramatic reunions. On this occasion Vic Parks, a former criminal who is now a big celebrity, is confronted in his sumptuous Spanish villa with the self-effacing Douglas Beechey. Seventeen years previously, Douglas briefly became a national hero when he tackled the armed Vic during a bank raid in order to protect a cashier. Now Douglas, working for a double-glazing firm in Purley, lives a quiet life with the scarred, reclusive cashier whom he eventually married. Vic, meanwhile, is now a TV presenter and as brutally obnoxious as ever.
Prompted in part by the fame accorded the Great Train Robbers, Ayckbourn's play pins down the twisted morality of the greed-is-good Thatcherite 1980s. Everyone assumes Douglas has some secret motive, and Vic's philosophy is revealed in his advice to a young viewer: "Don't complain to me that people kick you when you're down – it's your fault for lying there, isn't it?" It is also a modern morality tale and a damning portrait of TV's inability to excavate truth. The interviewer is exasperated by her failure to penetrate Douglas's facade of quiet content; it is left to Vic's wife to discover the real motive behind his act of heroism.
As always, Ayckbourn makes his points through laughter and his own production is unnervingly funny. Kim Wall, excellent in Just Between Ourselves in Northampton's Ayckbourn season, is even better as Douglas. He hilariously captures the character's awkward modesty, treating a suggestion that he remove his jacket as if it were an indecent sexual proposal; he also conveys the untarnished decency that prompted his original brave act. Malcolm Sinclair exudes the coarseness and self-regard of the unreconstructed Vic, and there is firm support from Laura Doddington as his abused wife and Ruth Gibson as the careerist TV presenter. Designer Michael Holt has even created an elliptical swimming pool that, like the play itself, is full of hidden depths. It's a cracking show that deserves a life beyond its brief Northampton run.
