Absent Friends
The Forum Arts Centre, Withywood School, January 1988
ABSENT FRIENDS
by Alan Ayckbourn
CAST
Diana - Ann Remmers
Evelyn - Katherine Speakman
Marge - Liz Bishop
Paul - Paul Hutchins
John - John Hesketh
Colin - Robin Seavill
DIRECTED BY
Tony Smith & Robin Seavill
PS
From the programme notes:
One quiet Saturday afternoon, five friends meet to throw a consoling tea party for Colin, an old acquaintance whose fiancée has recently drowned.
Diana is married to Paul, but has recently started to suspect his affections may be wandering. Evelyn is married to John, but not so that you’d notice. Marge is married to Gordon – and every single one of his multifarious symptoms.
Little by little, as they wait for their guest of honour, long-suppressed tensions begin to bubble to the surface, and by the time Colin arrives, not even his cheerful serenity and philosophical acceptance of life’s tragedies can save the afternoon from turning into a series of bitter recriminations and home truths.
ABSENT FRIENDS is a play about relationships and how through malice, thoughtlessness or simply lack of care, they can slowly come apart. It is sad but, like the best of Ayckbourn’s work, it is also true and above all wonderfully, helplessly and hearteningly funny.
I love a bit of Ayckbourn. As well as dominating the West End throughout the 1970s and ’80s, he quickly became the darling of amateur companies as well for his use of minimal sets, small casts, invariably contemporary settings which would require no expensive gadgets or props (the cast could even wear their own clothes), and the deceptively sunny mood he managed to create. Think of the cast of The Good Life but without the pigs and you’d be halfway there.
Ann R, RAS, Katherine S, Liz B, Paul H.
The tea was real
Of course, there’s a lot more to him than that, and Ayckbourn’s plays are far more complex and potentially dark than their surfaces often suggest. Even his first big success, Relatively Speaking which premiered in 1965, deals with an older man conducting an affair with a younger woman while both of them pull the wool over the eyes of her unsuspecting fiancé… who is led to believe throughout that the lover and his wife are the girl’s parents. Two m, two f, perfect symmetry of casting for the strongest members of your company, brilliantly sustained two-hour sophisticated middle-class farce, what’s not to like?
Paul H, RAS, John H – the calm before the storm
Absent Friends is similarly tight and balanced, with even more strain going on beneath the surface. We played it in a tiny studio theatre where the living room set was on the same level as the audience, whose seating comprised two sides of the acting area. This greatly enhanced the intimacy of the relationship between actor and audience and such enforced proximity increased the discomfort as the various relationships between the characters gradually broke down; it was as if the audience had suddenly found themselves unwilling spectators at a series of domestic disputes, each more consequential than the last.
From the acting point of view there was no need to project. All you had to do was be your character, and at certain moments you were even within touching distance of the front row and liable to fall over their feet if you weren’t careful. I don’t know how they felt about it, but the prospect terrified me.
Terrified and intrigued. I’ve done very little acting for the camera, but this experience must have been close to that – the notion of being in close-up all the time, and pretending to act natural in the very unnatural circumstance of having another’s gaze or a lens so close to your face that you could almost feel it.
It was an excellent little production and we got good, appreciative audiences throughout the run. And because my character was quite well-to-do (I decided), I even got to wear a posh middle class cardigan for once. (The one I’d worn in Close of Play a few years before had been a Christmas present from my mother years ago. In Absent Friends it was cashmere. Like I’d know…)
Ann R, doing probably the hardest thing an actor can do on stage – weep convincingly. Some of the rest of us are doing our best to help