Absurd Person Singular

Published Thursday 13 December 2007 at 13:55 by John Thaxter

Alan Strachan’s starry revival brings Alan Ayckbourn back to the West End for the first time since his Damsels in Distress flop. No such problems with this masterwork - call it a comedy if you must - written in 1972, when Ayckbourn first dipped his pen in a dark well of misanthropy that became his trademark. 

Set over three fraught Christmas Eves in three very different suburban kitchens, we watch as the nerdy Hopcrofts, played with terrifying accuracy by David Bamber as an ambitious shopkeeper and Jane Horrocks as his compulsively house-proud wife, change from inept arrivistes to sadistic, partying manipulators.

Their principal victims are the Brewster-Wrights, David Horovitch as a condescending banker and Jenny Seagrove as his toffee-nosed wife, whose chilly marriage dissolves in gin and separate bedrooms. The third couple, the Jacksons, are creatures of their own disastrous downfall - John Gordon Sinclair as a failed, philandering architect with Lia Williams superb as his flaky wife, switchbacking from pill dependency to gloomy normality, via a head-in-oven suicide attempt.

The better the playing the more devastating the effect, and this is a very fine cast indeed. A glorious funfest, the first act has pompous Bamber and anxious Ms Horrocks struggling with the social niceties, while she gets locked out in the rain and ends distractedly chanting a Christmas melody while cleaning up the mess. I watched the second act with growing horror as Ms Williams vainly tries to top herself and Horovitch meets near death by electrocution, while all around the audience was rocked with laughter.

But none of this quite prepares one for the terrors of the third act, closing with a Witches Sabbath conducted atop the kitchen table by the devilish, proto-Thatcherite Bamber, while the party, led by Ms Seagrove brilliantly playing drunk, dance to his tune. It’s enough to curdle one’s Christmas cream liqueur.