REVIEW: Bedroom Farce

By Gary Murray

The Summer Playhouse at The Park season at the Devonshire Park Theatre is a series of three plays presented by phil&ben productions using a company of actors in different roles.

After the psychological thriller Strangers On A Train, the first in the series, Alan Ayckbourn’s 1975 comedy could not be more different.

Of course, it isn’t really a farce in a trouser-dropping, implausible plot, contrived misunderstandings way. But it’s a comedy and, like the best of Ayckbourn’s work, there’s a lot going on under the surface.

The play takes place over one night and the following morning in the bedrooms of three very different couples. Into this mix comes a fourth couple, Trevor and Susannah (whose bedroom we never see) who blithely cause havoc with their self-absorbed insecurities.

The action switches effortlessly between the three bedrooms in designer Andy Newell’s set. Each room is at the same time both inner sanctum and a little claustrophobic. Much of the comedy comes from what happens when those precious spaces are good-naturedly ‘invaded’ by others.

My only issue with the set was a step ladder placed downstage which annoyingly obscured the view of one of the rooms from where I was sitting.

One of the great joys of this kind of repertory season is that the actors are used to working with each other. There are some superb physical comedy set pieces here. A particularly funny sequence is where bed-bound Nick, acerbically played by Phil Stewart, is trying to retrieve a dropped book by getting out of bed – without getting out of bed.

There’s nice work by the whole cast: Pete Ashmore and Louise Beresford as Trevor and Susannah, and George Telfer and Corrinne Wicks as older couple Ernest and Delia who eat pilchards in bed (the sardines had run out).

Simon Pothecary and Lucy-Jane Quinlan play Malcolm and Kate, haplessly trying to hold a party and Katy Dean is Jan, stoically putting up with husband Nick’s self pity (constant refrain: “why me?”)

Bedroom Farce was written and set during the 1970s but there’s no sense of a period piece here. The best comedy doesn’t date. And director Ben Roddy sets the pacing just right.

It’s a very funny evening. If you want to see comedy played at its best, go and see Bedroom Farce.

:: Bedroom Farce runs until Saturday, 12 July, at the Devonshire Park Theatre. Tickets available here

:: The reviewer paid for their own ticket