I couldn’t go to see “The Things We Do For Love” at The Richmond Theatre on Monday night so instead invited a friend of mine who is a massive Alan Ayckbourn fan to review it for me. He doesn’t disappoint:-
As soon as we enter the wonderful Richmond Theatre for a revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s Things We Do For Love we know we are in for treat. The safety curtain has a row of terraced houses projected onto to it. Classic Suburban architecture, classic Ayckbourn land ; the middle classes at home. Each scene of the play starts with girls singing the St Gertrudes school song – “lift up your skirts girls, open your legs girls “ – and date time and place. OCTOBER 25TH 1996, 7PM. FULHAM. No one does stage sets like Ayckbourn and the set for Things We Do For Love is sheer genius. If the image projected onto the safety curtain gives us the front elevation of a terraced house then the set itself gives us the side elevation by taking out the wall and showing a cross section of three storeys; the basement which only takes up 10% of the stage space ; then the ground floor flat which takes up 60% : and finally the top floor flat which takes up the remaining 30%. It is visually stunning and a brilliant device for simultaneously showing the lives of the occupants.
And what occupants. There is Barbara – played superbly by Claire Price – the owner/landlady of the house, a successful single woman, ex head girl of St Gerts. We see her in the first scene with her basement lodger Gilbert, a widower, postman and odd job man. Nikki Wicks – known at St Gerts as “no nicks wicks “ – is seeing Barbara for the first time in eleven years as she doing up a nearby property with her boyfriend Hamish a Scottish, vegetarian, oceanographer, and wants to rent the upstairs flat whilst in the interim.
Like all Ayckbourn’s farces “Things We Do For Love” unfolds as these four people interact, talk, shout, run up and down stairs, slam doors, fight and have sex. What makes Ayckbourn so compelling is the way he combines an absolutely hilarious entertainment with utterly profound insights into the human condition. We could call his stagecraft farce with pathos, or Ibsen but with jokes ! The inevitable dinner party scene illustrates this. Barbara and Nikki are waiting for Hamish and Gilbert who are over an hour late. They finally arrive but Gilbert is blind drunk. (Simon Gregor’s acting as a drunk party guest has never been bettered. It is worth the entry fee just to see this one scene. ) Gilbert proceeds to ruin the evening but being drunk is the only way he can express his love for Barbara. Sober he wears her clothes and paints nude ceiling paintings of her in his basement flat !
Some of the knock about farce is Ayckbourn at the top of his game. The scene where Barbara and Hamish have sex whilst Nikki is downstairs having a bath is enough to make one fall out of the stalls. It is brilliant. It is what live theatre and especially the English master of live theatre Sir Alan Ayckbourn does so well, it makes one glad to be alive.
The evening I was there was an Ayckbourn farce off stage as well as on. I saw people eating fish and chips, seconds before curtain up, in their cars parked on double yellow lines right outside the theatre, there were people in the wrong seats who couldn’t understand why and I heard a couple in the interval arguing over the play , he saying he didn’t like it and she saying well I’m really enjoying it !
