I'm always delighted when it's time for a new Alan Ayckbourn play. It feels like one of rituals of the autumn, popping up to the Old Laundry Theatre in Bowness-on-Windermere and enjoying the latest offering from this wonderful playwright. Ayckbourn is 85 this year, but he hasn't lost his wit and sharp eye for the idiosyncrasies of society.
Ayckbourn's most recent play is no exception, Show and Tell is very funny as well as being thought-provoking. On one level, Alan Ayckbourn’s 90th play is a sprightly comedy featuring a play within a play, itself described as “a sprightly comedy”. On another level it’s an exploration of the nature of imagination. What marks the difference between an individual who imagines themselves surrounded by people who are not there and a group of people who come together to pretend something is that is not?
One reviewer said "by presenting a comedy set in a drawing room within drawing room, on the theatre-in-the-round stage, Ayckbourn melts notions of a fourth wall into thin air (something Kevin Jenkins’s set does visually). Come the curtain call (for both plays), boundaries between actors and characters, between real and imagined audiences are dissolved. All are involved in a collective act of make-believe".
Show and Tell was excellent entertainment, Ayckbourn said that the play "is about something which has preoccupied me for the last 60 years and probably more - theatre....it's a love letter to theatre".
The play had an experimental feel to it; there was an element of the Theatre of the Absurd, and some similarities between Ionesco's The Chairs. The itinerant performers whose play A Friend Indeed takes up the fourth act is not Six Characters in Search of an Author, but rather three actors in search of an audience!
Ayckbourn left me with lots to think about: the nature of theatre and the boundaries between life and theatre but also a wonderful evening's entertainment.