Theatre

I attended the world premiere - advertised both on the internet and inside the local butcher's shop - of 'Friends Uninvited', a new play by Steven Ayckbourn, which took place in a tiny village nestled in the North Yorkshire moors.

Audiences - holidaymakers and the local farming community - at the 100 seat theatre of the Robinson Insitute in Glaisdale in the Esk Valley are enjoying a world-class performance.

Ayckbourn, building on his unique family background in the theatre, has boldly decided to give his father Alan’s prolific output of modern morality comedies a new and very contemporary spin on romance.

Following a reunion of old school friends, organised over the internet, the touch of a wrong computer key introduces havoc into three lives.

Jill and Duncan in Friends Uninvited.

At Scarborough’s Steven Joseph Theatre, I later saw the revival of  ‘Relatively Speaking’, Alan Ayckbourn’s first West End success of forty years ago. In this still delightful comedy, the old class stereotypes of English society in the seventies come to the fore, and one of the heroines is very much a victim.

The younger Ayckbourn, at 47, having also experienced more than a decade of life in America, operates at the cutting edge of today’s urban yuppiedom. Showing how times and tastes have changed, even in romance, his female lead Jill (played with panache by Beatrice Curnew), is no one’s victim. On the contrary, the feisty Jill, in the play a martial arts expert, tends to express herself in karate chops as she purposefully pursues Roger (Hugo Thurston), a  quintessentially lazy slob, who dodges responsibility, and Jill.

Having come into contact by error over the internet, the two invade the posh London apartment of  their former schoolmate, Duncan (Mark Beardsmore), a fastidious and nouveau riche computer security analyst whose pastimes are chess, tropical fish, and Mother. Poor Duncan, outclassed in his passions, ends up in a wheelchair.

Director is Mark Stratton, fresh from a successful Shakespearean tour in China, and producer, Sheila Carter. From Glaisdale the play transfers to the Middlesbrough Theatre September 4-8.

David Willey