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| L-R: Elizabeth Boag, Stephen Billington and Russell Dixon in CONFUSIONS. Photo by Tony Bartholomew. |
Alan
Ayckbourn is an enormously talented and prolific playwright with 79 plays to
his credit who frequently focuses in his work upon the seemingly eternal
“battle between the sexes” - that apparently unending conflict between
misogynistic, philandering and domineering males on one side and their often submissive
and mistreated female partners (who, nonetheless, often are the ones to have
the last laugh) on the other. It was in1974
that he wrote Confusions, a series
of five separate one act plays interconnected in having a character in each of
the first three appear in the next play on the program. Their interconnectedness was further enhanced
by the fact that all five related, in one way or another, to that “battle
between the sexes” and to the fact that they were performed by an ensemble cast
of just three men and two women playing 20 different challenging roles.
Confusions was first produced
at the Library Theatre in Scarborough in 1974 and had its London premiere in
1976 at the Apollo Theatre. Now, forty
years later, it is finally receiving its long overdue New York premiere as part
of this year’s Brits Off Broadway
program at 59E59 Theaters on East 59th Street in midtown Manhattan. It’s been a long time to wait but I must say
that this outstanding production by the Stephen Joseph Theatre of Scarborough
was well worth waiting for.
In
Mother Figure, the first of the five
plays on the program, Lucy (Elizabeth Boag) is the first of Ayckbourn’s
mistreated women to appear. Her husband,
Harry, a traveling salesman, is on the road , as he usually is, having little
interest in his family, and she is left to tend to their home and three
children herself. Nor is she doing a
very good job of it as both she and her home become increasingly disheveled to
the point that she doesn’t bother to change out of her nightclothes during the
day nor even answer the phone when it rings.
Lucy’s
neighbor, Rosemary (Charlotte Harwood), is herself mistreated by her male
chauvinistic husband Terry (Stephen Billington), and when they check in on her
to see how she is doing, she is rather non-plussed. Lacking adult companionship, her knowledge of
how to deal with adults in an adult manner has atrophied and she treats them
the only way she knows how: as if they, too, were children.
And
yet it works and it is Lucy and Rosemary, not Terry, who prevail. Terry not only drinks his milk (albeit
reluctantly) as a well-behaved child should but also apologizes to Rosemary for
his earlier disparaging behavior toward her.
Score one for the ladies.
In
Drinking Companion, Harry (Richard
Stacey), Lucy’s philandering traveling salesman husband (who we heard about but
never actually got to meet in Mother
Figure) is attempting heavy-handedly to seduce Paula (Charlotte Harwood)
and/or Bernice (Elizabeth Boag), either or both of the two younger women he has
encountered in his hotel’s bar. He
doesn’t get very far and the only beneficiary of his behavior would appear to
be the waiter (Stephen Billington) who serves round after round of drinks to
the three of them and who Harry tips somewhat more extravagantly as he becomes
increasingly intoxicated. Score two for
the ladies.
The
same waiter whom we met in Drinking
Companions is there again in Between
Mouthfuls but this time he is working in the hotel’s restaurant rather than
in its bar and is serving dinner to two couples seated at two different tables. Mr. and Mrs. Pearce (Russell Dixon and
Elizabeth Boag) are seated at one table, blissfully unaware of Polly (Charlotte
Harwood) and Martin (Richard Stacey) seated at the other. Polly and Martin saw the Pearces as soon as
they entered the restaurant, however, and, if it were up to Polly, she would
have left on the spot. But Martin, who
is employed by Mr. Pearce, refuses to leave, fearful that it would damage his
career if Mr. Pearce were to have seen him and might then have suspected that
he chose to leave the restaurant in order to to avoid his boss.
As
the waiter serves first one table and then the other, we become privy to their
respective conversations. Mrs. Pearce,
it seems, suspects that her husband has been having an affair but does not know
with whom. Martin is focused solely on
his career at the expense of his marriage which causes Polly considerable distress. We learn, too, that the relationship between
these two couples goes well beyond Martin’s employment by Mr. Pearce.
Before
the end of their meal, Polly has gotten sick to her stomach, not with the food
but with Martin, and storms off. Mrs.
Pearce has had it with Mr. Pearce as well and walks out – but not before
upending a plate of food in his lap. The
men, insensitive to the women’s feelings and seemingly unconcerned over their
withdrawal from the scene, meet and repair to the bar for a brandy. Score it a tie (although maybe the women did
win on points…Mrs. Pearce did get to upend that plate of food in Mr. Pearce’s
lap and Polly did manage to stick it to Martin in a way that I really can’t get
into without disclosing one of the play’s biggest surprises….)
Mrs.
Pearce shows up again in Gosforth’s Fete,
this time as the town councilor scheduled to deliver a speech launching the
building of a new village hall. Gosforth
(Russell Dixon), megaphone in hand, is overseeing the afternoon festival which
is being held on his land and is supervising the organization of the
accompanying tea in the tea tent by Milly (Charlotte Harwood). The vicar Richard Stacey) is also in
attendance but apparently even his divine connections can’t prevent everything
that could possibly go wrong from going wrong.
The
sound system isn’t working and Gosforth is having his hands full trying to fix
it. When he finally does, the consequences
of its working turn out to be worse than its not functioning at all as
announcements relating to matters that might better have remained concealed are
inadvertently revealed to all and sundry.
And then, when the sound system is functioning, it is the tap on the tea
urn that jams which ends up scalding the vicar, flooding the amplifiers, and literally
shocking (and potentially electrocuting) more than one participant at the
fete.
Meanwhile,
a troop of cub scouts at the fair have become virtually unmanageable, even by
their scoutmaster Stewart (Stephen Billington) who is (or at least had been)
engaged to marry Milly before all hell broke loose. As Stewart seeks solace in drink, thunderstorms
roll in, hastily built platforms and stages collapse, and the fair devolves
into utter chaos. It all makes for a
very funny slapstick scene that marks the comedic high point of the show. Everybody loses in this one (except the
audience which wins big).
It
all might have ended there on that exuberant note – but it doesn’t. There is still one play to go, A Talk in the Park, which differs
significantly from the other four. For
starters, none of the five characters in this play – Arthur (Russell Dixon),
Beryl (Elizabeth Boag), Charles (Richard Stacey), Doreen (Charlotte Harwood)
and Ernest (Stephen billington) – appeared or were even alluded to in any of
the other four plays and, perhaps even more telling, none of them seems to have
any real connection to any of the others in this play either. They are just five strangers seated on park
benches, each attempting to avoid unwanted contact with one of the others while
seeing nothing wrong in attempting to regale a third with his or her own tale
of woe. It is a sad commentary of the
degree to which individuals are taken with the importance of their own lives
and assume that everyone else should be interested in them as well while taking
little or no interest in the lives of others.
Because
A Talk in the Park is so different
from the other four plays, some critics over the years have contended that it
should not have been included in the Confusions
program, that the other four plays would have sufficed and that, had it been
omitted, it would have led to audiences leaving the theater in an even more
cheerful mood. I don’t agree. I’m not only delighted that Ayckbourn saw fit
to include A Talk in the Park in the
program but I actually consider it the best of the five plays, the one that is
the most thought-provoking, and the one that leads us to reassess the other
four in a different light.
The
five person ensemble cast of Confusions
is absolutely brilliant with each of the five cast members called upon to play
anywhere from three to five diametrically different roles. Elizabeth Boag’s transition from Lucy, a
virtually abandoned wife in Mother
Figure to Bernice, a tough younger woman whom her philandering husband is
seeking unsuccesfully to bed in Drinking
Companions, is truly remarkable. Her
further transitions into the haughty Mrs. Pearce in Between Mouthfuls and Gosforth’s
Fete and finally into Beryl, a battered woman, in A Talk in the Park are equally delicious.
Charlotte
Harwood has proven herself to be similarly versatile. As Rosemary in Mother Figure and again as Polly in Between Mouthfuls, she effectively plays the role of the
unappreciated wife; as Paula in Drinking
Companion she succeeds in fending off the unwanted advances of someone
else’s philandering husband; as Milly in Gosforth’s
Fete, she’s affianced to a Dudley Do-Right-type character but even he
doesn’t know all there is to know about her (at least not right away). And by the time she evolves into Doreen, a
seemingly mildly paranoid older woman in A
Talk in the Sun, she’s virtually come full circle.
Stephen
Billington, too, appears in all five plays: as the ubiquitous waiter in Drinking Companion and Between Mouthfuls; as the demeaning
husband, Terry, in Mother Figure; as
the Dudley Do-Right-type cub scout leader in Gosforth’s Fete; and, ultimately, as the unhappily married Ernest
in A Talk in the Park. He is effective across the board.
Richard
Stacey appears in four of the five plays but the range of characters he
portrays is as broad as that of any of the other cast members. He is Harry, the sleazy philandering
traveling salesman in Drinking Companion
and Martin, the self-centered husband, in Between
Mouthfuls, only to emerge as the vicar in Gosforth’s Fete. By the time we get to A Talk in the Park, he has morphed into Charles, a self-proclaimed
victim of misfortunes not of his own making.
Finally,
Russell Dixon appears in just three of the five plays but his roles are the
juiciest of all and he plays them for all they are worth. As the pompous Mr. Pearce, he dominates the
scene in Between Mouthfuls, only to
do himself even one better in his antic portrayal of the buffoonish Gosforth in
Gosforth’s Fete. And I daresay that of the five bench sitters
in A Talk in the Park, it is the
lecherous Arthur, played by Dixon, who is likely to remain with you the
longest.
