Theatre
Comic Potential (Lyric) Remember This (Lyttelton, National Theatre)
Winning strategy
Patrick Carnegy
The idiocies of television may be a soft target for a playwright like Alan Ayck- bourn, but the result is as crisp and invigo- rating as anything he's done. Comic Potential, the new play he directs at the Lyric, is set in a near-distant future when only robot-players, called actoids, can stand the tedium of peopling the formula-soaps — doubtless even their technology clocks in cheaper than Equity rates. Maybe this sounds like a bit of a groan, but the irre- sistible thing is that the actoids are flesh- and-blood actors, quite brilliantly so in Janie Dee. As actoid JCF 31333 she finds herself humanised into Jacie Triplethree whose programmed sense of fun sparks a relationship with Adam (the excellent Matthew Cottle), a would-be scriptwriter knocking about the production studio. Enter comedy as the subject of comedy, and in Ayckbourn's hands it's a winning strategy.
Chandler, the crappy soaps director (David Soul), has seen better days as a director once famous for his movies. He's aroused from his terminal creative fatigue by Adam's determination to wrest from him the long-lost secrets of true comedy. Jacie's invention of herself from scraps of every hammy role that's ever been pro- grammed into her is always in telling coun- terpoint with the stock soap situations from which Ayckbourn crafts his satire. At its heart is the magnetism between Adam, the most natural character in sight, and Jacie, the most accomplished actoid (just wait till you see her dance). This is the catalyst for scenes of cathartic hilarity and of deeply touching pathos. Like Wedekind's Lulu, Jacie's complaint is that she's had no choice but to become what she's been taken for.
Of course, the statue or mechanical doll
conjured into life is a time-honoured dra- matic gambit. Not the least of Ayckbourn's ironies is that the TV personnel exploiting Jacie emerge as no better than defective actoids ripe for 'meltdown', as the script unflinchingly puts it. There's a wickedly funny episode in the dining-room of the hotel to which Adam has fled with his sweetheart. Jacie's no sooner drained her Kiss-Me-Quick highball than a bleeper warns that her waste unit is over full. This requires Adam to dive under the tablecloth and urgently follow her all-too-audible instructions. The imaginative lady at the next table declares the manoeuvre to be 'romantic' and chidingly asks her man why he can't manage that sort of thing. It doesn't go down so well with the head wait- er who rumbles Jacie with the observation that it takes an android to know one. It's only fair to leave Comic Potential's crown- ing irony undisclosed. This is millennial comedy just as it ought to be, tackling seri- ous issues with weirdly wonderful invention and with the kind of exquisitely tuned humour that may win a little more mileage for such humanoids as are still abroad.
Stephen Poliakoff's Remember This, directed by Ron Daniels at the Lyttleton, has a more complex agenda that's to do with how we define our present from the past. Rick, a 50-ish bar-stool fantasist, is perhaps not alone in his unease about the unlabelled videos piling up upon the shelves, his worry that the precious footage of his golden years may be disappearing on the spool. Sometime pioneer of the wed- ding video, Rick sets out to make his mil- lion from his momentous discovery of video-fade-away. Poliakoff keeps you guessing about who'll be fool enough to pay for this intelligence. Some, like Rick's doctor. will be only too glad to bid jolly good riddance to the interminable video mountain. But as Stanley Townsend's Rick is a loveable rascal with an Irish accent, none of this matters overmuch. He's float- ing on the cash of his Sloaney blonde fiancée Victoria (Annabelle Apsion), the acumen of his redhead business-partner Margaret (Serena Evans), and the enigmat- ic attentions of Victoria's brunette sister Hannah (Geraldine Somerville), a smart management consultant who's not so smartly convinced that Rick harbours a world-winning strategy.
There's comic relief in surreal incursions by a pair of bonehead Gilbert and George comedians who run an immense Swiss video archive (Colin Hurley and James Duke). The gnomes are hugely pleased to discover that fade-away cuts otiose world leaders, as seen in clips of historic speech- es, down to size, their words and faces swallowed by an electronic grunt that's like 'a sort .of fart into oblivion'. Rick gets his comeuppance when his Oxonian D.Phil son reclaims his life by absconding with dad's loving videos of his childhood and creating an installation with them. Now you see it, now you don't, and the significant thing is that it's the sounds that really count. It's here and in dumb Victoria's discovery that the past can actually be accessed by the exercise of memory that Poliakoff's moral strikes home. Remember This is a skilful, finely acted show. On playback it feels as disconcerting as that jerky skeleton who used to demonstrate the immortality of someone or other's brand of recording tape.
Sheridan Morley is away, directing A Song at Twilight Noel Coward's last work, at the Gielgud Theatre with Vanessa and Corin Redgrave.
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