Seasons Greetings

Ayckbourn at the National, stuffed with TV comedy actors, and a Christmas show to boot. It’s not at the radical end of Nick Hytner’s programming, certainly. But I’ve always had a soft spot for this play, since seeing the BBC’s 1986 production of the play with Nicky Henson, Anna Massey, Geoffrey Palmer and Peter Vaughan. It was one of the bleakest Christmas shows I’d seen.

The story unfolds over the Christmas period, taking us from Christmas Eve through Christmas Day and Boxing Day, ending early on 27 December. We’re at the home of Neville and Belinda Bunker and they’ve invited Neville’s sister, Phyllis, and her husband Bernard; Belinda’s sister Rachel, and her friend, Clive, a novelist. Neville’s mate Eddie and his wife, Pattie, and Neville’s uncle, Harvey. They always spend Christmas together and are used to Rachel’s failure to get a man, Pattie’s perpetual pregnancy, Phyllis’s drunkenness and Bernard’s staggeringly dull puppet shows. All goes according to plan, though Clive’s appearance is a catalyst for chaos when he and Belinda are discovered having a noisy shag under the tree early on Boxing Day morning. Harvey destroys the puppet play and, later, shoots Clive, believing him to be a thief.

It’s a very funny play and it becomes emotionally more demanding as it goes on. What Ayckbourn does so well is capture the mixture of ridiculousness and despair in these ordinary lives. In Harvey, he’s created another of those quasi-fascist suburban tyrants like Vince in Way Upstream and Sidney Hopcroft in Absurd Person Singular. The play leads up to the devastating moment when Harvey gleefully smashes up the puppet show; we’ve been laughing at it the whole way through the play but Ayckbourn turns our feelings on a sixpence. Bernard’s heartfelt rage against Harvey isn’t much on the page but it’s definitive in performance; the small man standing up to the bully, and, of course, the artist standing up to the philistine:

You are a loathsome man, Harvey, you really are. You’re almost totally negative, do you know that? And that’s such an easy thing to be, isn’t it? So long as you stay negative, you’re absolutely safe from laughter or criticism because you’ve never made anything or done anything that people can criticise.

Bernard’s a man hemmed in by his awkwardness in the family, his patience, his politesse. Here he lets rip - petulantly, to be sure, but compared to his usual small talk, this is an aria.

What you immediately see on stage is that it’s an ensemble piece. Ayckbourn had spend years choreographing his characters around a theatre-in-the-round, sometimes, as in The Norman Conquests, across multiple plays. Here we see several rooms, lots of simultaneous action, and plenty of room for very truthful acting. Nicola Walker and Neil Stuke are particularly good (I spent a couple of minutes just watching Neil Stuke fix a toy racing car and it’s a lovely, detailed performance, full of detail and precision). Nicola, as Rachel, is an alienated soul who we first see pretending that Clive’s non-appearance is of absolutely no concern or interest to her and persuading us of the exact opposite; later she has a rather awkward bit of verbal comedy as she tortuously tries to give Clive up and then tries to offer herself to him, without ever really saying what she means; Nicola Walker somehow invests that with real feeling and meaning. Neil Stuke pulls off one of Ayckbourn’s most audacious handbrake turns; he’s spent the whole play oblivious to his marriage and the chaos around him and has been dismissing the discovery of his wife and Clive as a drunken mistake. Clive tries to protest that he wasn’t drunk:

NEVILLE (quietly and pleasantly) Let’s put it this way. If I thought for one moment that you’d been down there on my floor in my hall under my Christmas tree, trying to screw my wife while you were both stone-cold sober, that would put a very different complexion of things. because in that case, I promise you I would start to take you to pieces bit by bit. And as for her, she’d find herself back on the Social Security before she had time time to pull her knickers up.

Neil delivers the brutality of it, the leering misogyny, with unmistakeable force, without raising his voice and losing the perpetual wry smile on his face. Mark Gatiss, of the comedians, is by far the best, giving Bernard dignity despite a good deal of absurdity. His outburst is heroic, defiant: Antigone in a cardigan. The weak link is Catherine Tate, who just does funny voices most of the night. Her attempted seduction of Clive is played for laughs and we don’t engage with it, nor do we see what is unsatisfying in her marriage. There’s a short sequence towards the end of scene two when she tries to interest Neville in a discussion of their marriage (‘I mean, maybe love’s too strong a word to use. Perhaps it’s friendship I’m talking about. We’re still friends. That’s what I mean.’) which should be a moment missed, a point of genuinely attempted contact that was not seen; instead it’s played on the surface and the whole picture of the marriage suffers. It shows, really, that when Ayckbourn’s good, as he is here, he really needs acting and truthfulness.

I wonder if we’ll ever see Ayckbourn the way the French sometimes do, as a contemporary naturalist anatomising middle-class pain; instead, despite almost everything he’s written, we seem determined to see him as a boulevardier, as if he hadn’t written anything but clones of Relatively Speaking. Perhaps his theatrical instincts are too sound; maybe he is so good at knowing what pleases an audience, and so smoothly effective at delivering it, that we don’t feel it going down, whereas in translation, where there’s always a burr, a remainder, an adjustment, there’s time and space to feel what is difficult and uncomfortable in his work. It’s possible to be too good a playwright and maybe Ayckbourn’s our eminent example.