Theatre
Henceforward (Vaudeville)
Machine maid
Christopher Edwards
Alan Ayckbourn's fertile talent for anatomising suburban marital despair has found yet another expression. It is, in essence, a familiar study of the basic failings of Homo ayckbourniensis, only this time the play is set in a bleak, sub-Botho Strauss urban landscape some time in the near future. Unlike that intellectual Ger- man playwright, with his solemn line in 'alienation', Ayckbourn homes in on the crisis of the humdrum. Whatever the outer appearances, " Ayckbourn's tragi-comic vision is all to do with the domestic relations of the middle classes.
We meet Jerome (Ian McKellan) in his bunker-like apartment flanked by hi-tech recording equipment. He is attended by a female robot. Apart from providing the play with a great deal of amusing business, the electronic set pinpoints this character's complete divorce from the world of human feeling, a common failing in the Ayck- bourn male. Jerome is a composer sepa- rated from his wife Corinna (Jane Asher). Corinna, brittle and bitchy, will not let him see their daughter because, she claims, Jerome lacks any of the domestic virtues. Thisis something of an understatement. And the Welfare State agrees with her, in the form of the officious and richly ridi- culed Mervyn (Michael Simkins).
But in fact none of the characters posses- ses much humanity. Small wonder that the young daughter has turned into a zombie, mimicking the urban bandits who seem to have taken over London. She dresses in a far-out mode of aggro punk and insists she is a man. The only creature she responds to is the robot, a point too weighed down with mawkish significance to labour any further.
So the robotic conceit is central. The first robot (played by Jane Asher) sets up pathos and comic diversions for the actual appearance of Corinna in Act Two. Jerome's scheme is to fool the social worker into certifying that he is fit to have his daughter back, by parading a robot as the ideal ' domestic companion. First, however, he interviews a flesh-and-blood girl for the job (brilliantly played by Serena Evans). Discovering that.he cannot endure real people, he programmes all her most
acceptable and normal qualities into the machine. The same actress then takes over as the robot. Ayckbourn's play-off be- tween humans and humanoid is superbly done. At its best, the laughter is painful in several pointed senses. And even if an irredeemable sentimentality does keep seeping through, this is a brilliantly acted production, artful, theatrical and touching to its suburban core.
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