First night of Alan Ayckbourn’s 75th professionally produced full length play. 75th!!! How prolific can you be…where does he get all his ideas? I love his plays – used to go with my father years ago. Now it seems the audience has remained relatively old – we need to find a way to get young people interested in what he has to say. The slight difficulty there is that he generally manages to take big ideas and concepts and make them manageable in a much smaller way – sort of kitchen sink dramas with attitude.
“Neighbourhood Watch” is just that. A suburban setting with a sting in the tail – or better still a sting in the tale…One set. A sitting room with sofas in which feature a variety of interesting characters throughout the almost 2.5 hour play. Great acting by all the characters. The man sitting behind me did not stop laughing from beginning to end. I’m not sure that was appropriate because it was quite dark in some areas (not literally obviously). Ayckbourn as usual covered lots of issues brilliantly – he does this via a committee that has been set up to put their little world to rights. He uses it to simply highlight issues of racism, infidelity, homosexuality et al that they don’t appear to think is anything to do with them. He presents that fascinating human condition of only being able to see your own “truth” brilliantly and the “we only see what we want to see” thing. Even better are the little sub-committee’s they keep inventing including the “Disruption and Punishment Sub-Committee – the D & P” they keep referring to.
It’s on until Saturday 11th February. If you like Alan Ayckbourn plays you won’t be disappointed.
