Reviews
of Time of My Life
The
Stage
Time of My Life, Aberystwyth Arts Centre
Alan Ayckbourn's black comedy of claustrophobic
family life and ties is given a riveting and surreal twist by Swansea-based
Volcano Theatre Company.
Volcano can usually be relied upon to deliver the goods fast—physical
theatre is its speciality—and gift-wrapped. This touring production,
stopping off at the Arts Centre, backs the company's guarantee which
brought us, among many others, Under Milk Wood to shock the Dylan
devotees and its own Vagina Dentata, a biting female farce.
Volcano director Paul Davies is the ideal person to milk Ayckbourn's
mastery of cow-pat dialogue and poetic justice. Set in the Stratton
family's favourite restaurant, the play charts, chats and eats its way
through the rise and fall of the family's fortunes and relationships.
Brendan Gregory is munificent as the grand-daddy, wonderfully balanced
by the bitchy upper-middle class tartiness of "mother" Belinda
Low. Fern Smith is great as the pathetically doting daughter-in-law
to Hywel Morgan's philandering son, while Suzanne Cave's working class
heroine bubbles hormones over relentlessly prodigal son Michael Geary.
All the family are kept in motion by Juan Carrascoso who plays for laughs
several generations of restaurant owner Calvinu.
Ostensibly, this is a play abou a generation past, a generation strangled
by its struggle to survive the encroaching modernity of liberation.
Not too far around the corner is millennium newness, and this is where
Volcano really succeeds, in casting a guilt-ridden look back with an
all too revealing glimpse of the futile similarity of the present.
Swithin Fry
The Western Mail
23 September 1998
Time of My Life, Swansea Grand Theatre
Ayckbourn
humour pushed that little bit further
With
Alan Ayckbourn you think you're safe: an enormously witty, clever, perceptive
man of the theatre; Britain's most successful playwright; astute chronicler
of the Anglo-Saxon middle classes of the 20th Century.
His many plays—farcical, poignant, telling, acute, a slice of life
from the bank-manager belt of middle England—are the mainstay of
virtually every theatre in the land (including Theatr Clwyd, whose programme
includes three Ayckbourns.
But now Volcano Theatre, best known for athletic, left-wing stage explorations
of sex and politics, have got hold of him. And by according Mr A the
ultimate accolade of "Very Important Playwright", they treat
him just as they have Shakespeare and Ibsen, a suitable case for treatment—and
the result is a startling piece of work that may disturb both Ayckbourn
and Volcano afficionados, but will delight those who appreciate risky,
challenging, intelligent theatre.
Not that they have taken liberties with the script, or with Ayckbourn's
familiar idea that the English bourgeoisie are essentially cruel and
self-destructive. We witness the awful matriarch of the family as she
celebrates her 54th birthday in their favourite restaurant; we look
ahead to the fate of one son and his wife and back to the history of
the relationship between another and his partner.
Ayckbourn plays with time very effectively as we watch with horror a
microcosm of middle-class society in all its selfish, depressing totality—we
have simply Ayckbourn country stripped of its conforming humour and
pretend-reality.
Paul Davies's direction treads a difficult but sure line between naturalism
and anti-naturalism. In other words, we recognise the characters, we
hear the barbed conversations, we acknowledge the tensions... but at
the same time this is no sitcom or familiar soap opera, as one couple
circle each other as in some pre-mating or predatory trap; as as people
get on to revolving tables;, as discordant music clinks away; as body
language becomes as eloquent as the written word.
It put demands on the cast as maybe not all have quite got the balance
right yet, but on its opening at Swansea Grand Theatre it was still
astunning show.
There is humour, but not the usual Ayckbourn kind as it comes more from
physical situations than from the text.
What these Volcanic iconoclasts have done, in brief, is push Ayckbourn
that little bit further.
Exposed is not just a middle class that is self-obsessed and amoral,
and so the deserving butt of amused ridicule as says the bourgeois playwright,
but a product of a society that alienates humans from real feeling,
from love, from sympathy; and so robs them of any chance of fulfilment
and happiness, insists the radical theatre maker.
Depressing, maybe, and in Volcano's hands more a warning and a call
for change than a subject for satire.
David Adams
Cardiff
Post
Time of My Life, Sherman Theatre
A cleverly devised play was made to sparkle under the direction of Paul
Davies with the cast able to shine on a simple, uncluttered set. Special
mention must go to Juan Carrascoso, who was, for me, the star performer,
taking on no less than five roles as members of the restaurant staff.
This was a superb production which deserved more than a two-night stint
at the Sherman.
Look out for the award-winning Volcano Theatre Company in the future.
Tom Edwards
Planet: The Welsh Internationalist
[...] in their latest production, Alan Ayckbourn's
Time of My Life, the company demonstrates a desire to cross boundaries
by employing their distinctive physicalised style of playing to suit
the needs of Ayckbourn's drama. Director Paul Davies justifies what
might be seen as a surprising choice for an experimental theatre company
by stressing the underlying seriousness of Ayckbourn's play and its
affinity to Ibsen's domestic dramas which exposed "the unspoken
horrors of domestic life. Horrors of commission and omission that rob
us of vitality, joy and honesty."
In the case of Time of My Life, the horrors centre around the older
generation's (here a self-made businessman and his dominant wife's)
control of their two sons' lives which has resulted in one being underpraised
but aspiring and the other much preferred but completely unable to achieve
anything. The drama takes place over a number of family meals in the
same restaurant; and in a series of flashbacks, and subsequent scenes,
we are invited into the complex layering of lies, truths, failed aspirations,
unacknowledged feelings and misunderstandings that form the basis of
the Stratton family's history.
The pivotal moment is the impossible mother's fifty-fourth birthday
celebration. Andrew Jones's extraordinary monumental setting, which
includes revolving tables and starkly expressionist lighting, emphasises
the fluid movement between past and future in Ayckbourn's construction
of the play, and also conveys the sense of relationships within the
family spinning out of control. In darkening the mood of the play and
in veering away from the caricature that is a common feature of more
mainstream Ayckbourn productions, the director has allowed Brendan Gregory
and Belinda Low, as the overbearing parents, to develop great complexity
of character and relationship. By way of contrast the two sons are under-realised,
pale shadows of the parents—a somewhat risky directorial strategy
which, although natural, at times tilts the emotional balance of the
production.
At some point in the 1980s Alan Ayckbourn's plays ceased to be funny,
as it became more and more apparent that he viewed the project of family
life in Britain as a remorseless trap; its constricting structures echoed
in the tight patterning of time and place he employs in his work. If
anything emerges[...], it is a sense of crisis. The key locations of
our personal worlds—family, employment, heritage, language, region,
nature—are all in a state of turmoil and reassessment. In this
stylish and illuminating production, Volcano realises Ayckbourn's Ibsenite
intention to reveal the untold horrors that can lurk behind the façade
of seemingly comfortable family life. In a similar vein, archaeologist
David Austen reminded delegates admiring the Ceredigion landscape of
the precariousness of contemporary rural life; that the agricultural
project (partly initiated by agronomists such as Thomas Johnes of Hafod)
that tamed the Welsh countryside was now in serious decline with disease-ridden
cattle, suicidal farmers and widespread poverty. Perhaps on this Cassandra-like
note, I should refrain from writing any more, as contrary to my conclusion
I enjoyed [..] Volcano's new production enormously.
Anna-Marie
Taylor
