Passed his best before date

One of my favourite (for there were a few) roles was that of Norman in the brilliant Norman Conquests. I was very lucky to play Norman in all three. Most of the cast reprised the parts each year around Christmas to the delight of themselves and the same audience (I think). Truly Alan Ayckbourn at his best. Tonight we saw him at his worst.

Neighbourhood Watch, which finished it’s two week run at the Yvonne Arnaud, is his 75th play. That’s a pretty amazing canon of work. Is it any wonder that occasionally he gets it wrong. I have read a couple of quite generous reviews but, honesty, it wasn’t very good.

There was even a horrendous actor in it. The guy was appalling. I’m not going to name him because he wasn’t good enough for ANY publicity.

Worst of all though, was the play itself. Not up to scratch and certainly not clever enough. It had lots of laughs – we both had a jolly good chuckle more than once – but, on the whole, the dialogue wasn’t very clever. If anything, the laughs were a bit forced and sometimes just obvious.

Oddly, I have read a whole bunch of good reviews for the plays world premiere performance. It’s like they watched a different play. Seriously!

For the acting, I thought most of the cast did a good job given the material. Particularly good was Alexandra Mathie as Hilda. She was all very nice on the surface but there was something quite scary hiding just underneath. That something peeked out a few times and was ghastly to behold. I felt a bit sorry for her (the actor, not the character) because I thought she was wasted.

I also felt her pain when she had to mime locking up a double set of sliding glass doors. I felt it even more when she had to unlock it the next morning. This sort of thing is all well and good for students or actors learning mime but not for a mature actor working in a ‘straight’ play with a normal set.

Possibly the worst thing about the play was the direction. There isn’t a word bad enough to describe it. A lot of upstaging, uncomfortable and meaningless moves, characters picking up things for no reason…just awful. It made quite uncomfortable viewing.

I’m not going to bother about the set.

The play is transferring to London in April. Dionysus, help them!