Theatre
Here (Donmar Warehouse) Time of my life (Vaudeville)
Extra time
Sheridan Morley
At the Donmar Warehouse, Michael Frayn's Here is essentially about time and space: it has all the minimalist, staccato qualities of his early novels and journalism, and seems at times to have been cobbled together by an unholy alliance of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. But, as usual, Frayn has his own eccentric corner of their more familiar territory.
Two young people, of whom we never know much more than that they start in love and drift gently out of it, arrive in a bare room. They begin to furnish it for each other until, by act two, they are bick- ering about personal space: get, as Virginia Woolf always said, a room of your own and on one level Here could just be a statement of the need for privacy if any sort of rela- tionship is ever to survive.
But the play's only other character, a widowed landlady, hauntingly well played by Brenda Bruce, suggests that Frayn may be on about something else altogether: the fact that even a bare space has already been occupied by someone else already,
and there is therefore no such thing as starting from scratch once the memories are already in the walls. Then again, in a brilliantly stage-managed production by Michael Blakemore (he of City of Angels and Noises Off) there is one breathtaking moment when in front of our very eyes one of the characters disappears entirely, only to reappear ten seconds later as if nothing had happened. So is Here about the fact that nobody is really here at all?
lain Glen and Teresa Banham do all they can within the limits of the script to suggest that they are real people acting out a real drama of couple-disintegration: but time and again Frayn seems to drift away from this, as if aware that it has been done rather too often, and into some other world of spatial relationships. Here is an endlessly Scrabbled wordplay about territorial imper- atives and the life-cycle of a relationship, in which the participants play a series of increasingly desperate games to try and cheat the passage of time as symbolised by the ever-present clock.
True, it doesn't work as a play, despite everything that Blakemore has done to dis- guise its shortcomings: but even a Frayn failure is more intriguing than most other dramatists' hits.
In the programme-notes to his Time of My Life, Alan Ayckbourn rightly pays trib- ute to J. B. Priestley whose Time plays have clearly been its inspiration: curiously though, he doesn't mention an even more direct forerunner, Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner, nor yet A. R. Gur- ney's The Dining Room. In those two plays, as here, one dinner party occupies the evening, but it is a party which we leave to flash forwards and backwards in time so that one moment of apparent domestic happiness is seen in a much wider frame of general domestic doubt and despair.
The principal characters here will be familiar to all students of Ayckbourn's sub- urban classes in distress: there's the tired businessman (Anton Rodgers) whose bom- bast hides the secret that his business is in a state of near-collapse; there's the wife whose clenched smile hides a lifetime of hurt and hatred; and the children who, as usual, have failed to live up to even their own limited expectations.
There are three simultaneous time- scales. The central restaurant table gives us time present, the one stage left gives us time future and the one stage right is reserved for time past. The same waiters (magnificently delineated by one actor, Terence Booth) serve them all, frequently piling plates high with a selection of desserts under the misapprehension that a character is nodding in anticipation rather than suicidal despair. Ayckbourn is also immaculately served by Anton Rodgers and Gwen Taylor as the parents and by Richard Garnett and Stephen Mapes as their unsatisfactory offspring.
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