You have to love Alan Ayckbourn. There’s
always a gimmick in his plays, my favorite of which are THE NORMAN CONQUESTS.
Like the NORMANs,
HOUSE and GARDEN have the same cast in each play, one play in the garden and
the other inside the house. But here, as Gabby Hayes used to say, is “the
beauty part:” They’re performed simultaneously, with the actors madly sprinting
from one exit in the HOUSE play to an entrance in GARDEN. This, of course,
necessitates two theater spaces in the same building and a stage manager with
nerves of steel to keep it all meshing perfectly.
I saw HOUSE upstairs at Trinity Rep (and
peeked in downstairs at Eugene Lee’s gorgeous garden set for the other play)
where Lee’s set for the indoors play reflects the ancestral grandeur of an old
manor house, complete with oil portraits of earlier movers and shakers. Ayckbourn
sets up lots of laughs and lots of seeds for future harvest but some (like the
tragic demise of female forbears or the tantalizing mention of “Penelope”)
never sprout—leaving me confused because every tidbit usually pays off
handsomely in Ayckbourn comedies. House (and GARDEN) offer an embarrassment of
riches but plot isn’t one of them (nor is a satisfying ending).
Never mind those details. We’re treated to
marvelous shenanigans when the current head of the estate is courted by friends
of the Prime Minister as a candidate for office, buoyed by his father and
grandfather’s service record as an M.P. All he has to be is above reproach, the
one thing he is not. All hell breaks loose at a luncheon to cement the deal
when his wife refuses to speak to him, his lover and her husband arrive, he
drinks too much and a French film star on her way to rehab joins the party.
Director Brian McEleney gets hilarious
performances from everyone but especially from Anne Scurria, who elevates the
act of saying “no” to an art, from Stephen Thorne as the awfully nice, somewhat
clueless best friend of the prospective politician (Fred Sullivan, Jr. playing
exasperated a thousand different ways) and from Phyllis Kay as the inebriated
French actress. Ayckbourn concocts endless mayhem to “obstruct the inevitable”
but HOUSE does eventually end, sadly with just a whimper.