Private Fears in Public Places is a great title for what could be Alan Ayckbourn's most significant recent play. Having transferred from Scarborough to an award-winning run off-Broadway, it now receives its first British revival in a new production by Chris Honer.
Yet one wonders if, given a blind test, many people would identify the author as Ayckbourn at all. It's resolutely downbeat, and runs for 90 minutes without an interval. Compositionally it takes the form of short, sometimes even wordless, vignettes; and instead of a plot Ayckbourn offers six bewildered characters in search of a life.
Hearty, officer-class Dan has been dismissed from the army for some unspecified offence, which puts intolerable strain on his highly-strung fiancee Nicola. While she hunts for flats they will clearly never move to, he slips off to get quietly drunk in the company of Ambrose, a lonely, lugubrious barman who lives with his father.
The couple's estate agent, Stewart, spends evenings alone with TV dinners, while his sister Imogen endures a grim round of dating agency disappointments. But the real surprise is Charlotte, Stewart's prim, Bible-clasping office manager, who runs a predictable sideline as a voluntary carer, and a rather less predictable one as a porn actress.
I admit to being baffled, even slightly underwhelmed, on my first encounter with the play, and particularly doubtful as to the plausibility of Charlotte's double-life. But Honer's exemplary revival picks out significant themes and motifs I missed the first time round.
For her dating encounters, Alice James's affectingly vulnerable Imogen orders a cocktail called a Devil's Tail and assumes the name Scarlet, which echoes the colour of the dress Olwen May's outstanding Charlotte squeezes into when giving reign to her satanic underside. This remains as enigmatic and ambiguous as anything Ayckbourn has written: yet it's important to realise that the devil is in the detail.
· Until September 30. Box office: 0161-236 7110.
