The plays of Alan Ayckbourn, England’s master farceur, are models of comedic structure, crafted from everyday situations that get hilariously out of hand. His trademark is structural gimmicks that play with space and/or time. Absurd Person Singular (a title that, according to the author, has nothing whatever to do with the play) takes place over three consecutive Christmas Eves in three different kitchens.
This play was Ayckbourn’s first attempt, as he later put it, “to run the contrasting strands of theatrical darkness and light almost parallel”—in this case, turning a routine domestic farce that plays on marital and class relationships into a social satire on ambition and arrogance. It appeared in 1972, when the Thatcherite brand of middle-class screw-you conservatism was poised to tip the balance of power in Britain.
In Barrington Stage Company’s production, Jo Winiarski’s trio of sets and Sara Jean Tosetti’s appallingly apt ’70s costumes capture the style and substance—low-, middle- and high-brow, respectively—of the three married couples in whose kitchens the play unfolds. The first act finds Sidney and Jane, their bungalow’s kitchen a spic-and-span nightmare of laminate and primary colors, hosting a Christmas party for an architect and a bank manager—business connections Sydney needs to expand his little shop—and their wives.
The architect, Geoff, is a smug philander, his wife Eva an obsessive consumer of antidepressants. Ronald, the banker, has the kind of sardonic tolerance that comes with money and is necessary when you’ve got a snooty inebriate for a wife. The comedy in Act One comes from the self-conscious host couple’s doomed attempts to throw a stylish party for their betters. The comic ante is upped in the second act, set in Geoff and Eva’s rather scruffy flat, when Eva makes repeated attempts to commit suicide—pills, knife, oven, rope, paint stripper—while the others obliviously attend to other crises.
The play is structured as a two-act farce, but with a third act coming after the comic climax at the Act Two curtain. Act Three becomes darker, matched by Peter West’s shadowy lighting of the mock-rustic kitchen in Ronald and Marion’s country house. By then, the financial tables have turned, with Sidney a rising entrepreneur and Geoff and Ronald soliciting business from him. The final curtain comes down, not on chaotic hilarity, but a bizarre danse macabre.
The wives are at once the funniest and the most sympathetic of the play’s characters. Their husbands, fixated on their own needs, either ill-treat or simply ignore them. And I found the three women’s performances the most appealing: Julia Coffey as compulsive housekeeper Jane, manically desperate to please; Finnerty Steves as compulsive pill-popper Eva, who in Act Two says not a word but gets most of the laughs in her determination to do herself in; and Henny Russell, flamboyantly and hypocritically noblesse oblige as compulsive tippler Marion.
The three men are also effective: Barrington regular Christopher Innvar as self-satisfied Geoff, Graeme Malcolm as wry Ronald, and especially Robert Petkoff as the gauche but dogged Sidney. Director Jesse Berger nails the author’s intended balance between laughs and winces, and the pre-show Christmas carols and Santa decorations—in August!—set the right incongruous mood.
Absurd Person Singular: through Aug. 29, Barrington Stage Company, 30 Union St., Pittsfield, (413) 236-8888, barringtonstageco.org.
