The Stage

Henceforward

Published Monday 13 February 2006 at 15:45 by Pat Ashworth

Ayckbourn conceives of a frightening future world where people live in heavily fortified houses and are preyed on by street gangs like the Daughters of Darkness and the Sons of Bitches.

His flawed hero Jerome, is a composer living with a robot nanny built to look like his estranged wife in a jumbled studio containing a towering bank of surveillance technology. Breaches of the perimeter result in alarms and flashing screens, all very imaginatively realised. Living with a robot means Jerome can satisfactorily detach himself from any human emotions, but de facto is also unable to compose.

Full credit to Sherry Baines and to Emma Fildes, who each play to perfection a robot self in one half and a human self in the other. Baines’ creation turns out as something of a cross between Acorn Antiques’ Mrs Overall and Father Ted’s Mrs Doyle and Fildes’ is a frilly, vacuous, relentlessly cheerful dolly bird. Their mechanical movements and speech and the limitations of their programmed understanding produce some hilarious moments.

Julian Protheroe is never off stage as Jerome, in a taxing role that he manages to sustain and there is a delicious minor role for Tom Godwin as the deadly boring and unconsciously comic Mervyn, child support agent and walking communications centre.

The play is too long and the first half drags, despite all there is to amuse. But the pace picks up with more human interaction and all is redeemed in the darkest of black comedy endings - spectacular disintegration.