Bedroom Farce

Play (1975)
by Alan Ayckbourn

With Malcolm Ingram (Ernest), Patricia Hodges (Delia), Nael Nacer (Nick), Mahira Kakkar (Jan), Richard Hollis (Malcolm), Emma Kaye (Kate), Karl Miller (Trevor), Katie Paxton (Susannah)

There has been a party at the home of Kate (Emma Kaye) and Malcolm (Richard Hollis), and the strain between Nick (Nael Nacer) and Jan (Mahira Kakkar), a youngish married couple, has caused a ruckus. Meanwhile, Trevor’s (Karl Miller) parents, Delia (Patricia Hodges) and Ernest (Malcolm Ingram), are rambling about their bedroom, eating kippers and drinking chocolate while worrying about Trevor’s and Susannah’s (Katie Paxton) marriage. The third wheel in the bedroom ruckus belongs to Jan, Trevor’s old lover, whom he encounters at the party. Her husband, Nick, is laid up in bed in that third bedroom, barely able to move and squealing in pain at every attempt to do so. Trevor and Susannah manage to traverse the three bedrooms in the course of their meanderings, weaving a series of dilemmas and leading towards something that might seem like morning.

What a charming and uncomplicated entertainment that Ayckbourn has written. He manages to deliver a vivid sense of this small gaggle of interrelated couples, and while creating mostly a sense of antics and fun, also conveys an appreciation of the pain of relationship.

Even the most straightforward couple, Kate and Malcolm, exhibit their amorous stresses, and in Ayckbourn’s hands, do so with poignant humor. As Kate owns up to sometimes feeling bored while making love with Malcolm and indicates that she thinks about how to reorient household furnishings at such times, the ache of revelation becomes vivid at the same time it is very funny. Kate’s guilelessly honest rendering of this fact, and Emma Kaye’s beautifully unadorned depiction of her, works charmingly with Malcolm’s upbraided sexual ego, hilariously displayed by Richard Hollis, as he wrestles to accommodate the thought that his wife might not always think of him as a sexual god.

Nael Nacer’s antics as the bedridden and uptight Nick are very funny and another reminder of Nacer’s incredible versatility. He is an absorbingly capable dramatic actor (showing his stuff recently and memorably in The Flick at Gloucester Stage and in many other local productions), but here he shows his true comic gifts both with British wit and pure physical shenanigans.

Mahira Kakkar who plays Jan, Nick’s wife and Trevor’s old flame, is also very good. She displays a cool crispness that hovers over a steamy core that works very well in the part, both as a foil for Trevor and for Nick.

Karl Miller and Katie Paxton as Trevor and Susannah hold down the focal duo with aplomb, both doing a good job of representing the flaky and ditzy pair working out their marital angst.

And Malcolm Ingram and Patricia Hodges as the parents paint a great landscape of what, in British terms, might create the grounds for departures of ditziness and for an eventual return to sanity.

The set by Alexander Dodge is colorful and ingenious.

Reamrkably, Ayckbourn manages to convey something more about the human condition than one might expect from a mere farce. One might say that this is a play that is less funny than it seems, while still making one laugh. The Huntington, under Maria Aitken’s able direction, has created here a production of delightful light fare that provides more dramatic nutrition that one might expect.

– BADMan