In this, the fifty-first of seventy-six full-length plays written by Alan Ayckbourn, he explores, as he often did in the seventies when his own marriage was coming to an end, the theme of relationships in crisis. But Ayckbourn can be guaranteed to add a little farce to the darkness to keep his audience onside.
Whether we have the strength of will to resist the gravitational pull of someone who can unleash the parts of ourselves that are unrealised and desperate to get out is something we just cannot know until it (suddenly in this case) happens.
Barbara (Claire Price), a well-spoken ex-head prefect from a private school, is now a thirty-something reasonably comfortable and self-sufficient professional PA living in a typical terraced house in Fulham. She lets the basement to a postman, Gilbert (Simon Gregor) who helps with odd jobs around the house.
Enter ex-school buddy Nikki (Natalie Imbruglia) with her new man Hamish (Edward Bennett). Barbara is happy for the two to rent the upstairs floor while their new house is completed before they move in – all very polite, all above board. But a sexual time bomb ticks.
The play’s success depends very much on Claire Price’s skill in portraying the tension between Barbara’s unflappable, conservative and controlling character and the vivid something tethered beneath her presented persona. Barbara’s rude and unapologetically critical proclamations on Hamish’s vegetarianism and ‘Scottishness’ will later count for nothing as unabashed animal passion takes hold. Price holds her own admirably in an epicentre of crush, fixation and lust.
Some of the writing grates – at the start Gilbert’s endless droning about the house’s hot water pipes went on far too long for my liking, and the women singing their school song a little too uncomfortable. Certainly blatant antipathy towards vegetarians has faded since the late nineties. But the festering frustrations within the spiky dialogue between Barbara and Hamish were enough to inject the plot with enough bile to make things interesting.
Ayckbourn was inspired by the camera angle used when two CIA agents go to bed with one another in the film Line of Fire starring Clint Eastwood. The action was framed from the ankle down. For the staging of Things We Do For Love, the Fulham flat is presented like a cut-away dolls house, Barbara’s living room is in full view, but we can only see a small sliver of the rooms above, and similarly below. The proximity of sub-dramas being played out semi-screened and divided as they are by a few centimetres of wood and plaster adds effectively to the play’s theme of revelation and concealment.
Natalie Imbruglia does a good job of presenting the sweet and mild Nikki in this her stage debut – most convincing when mewling excuses for not having sex with the hot-bloodied Hamish, her ‘Big Bear’. It is from this that Edward Bennett builds up Hamish’s increasingly pent-up impatience extremely well. His discovery of postman Gilbert’s secret shrine to Barbara below stairs, and in particular his lascivious painting of her on the basement ceiling, is enough to make him view her in a different light.
The eventual frothing over of lust and violence between Hamish and Barbara is cleverly exploited by Ayckbourn. The sudden confusion the four protagonists are plunged into affords some of the wittier moments, such as Barbara and Hamish’s faffing over a convenient date in their brimming diaries in order to tell Nikki she is extra to requirements.
Simon Gregor’s excellent portrayal of the pathetically love-lorn and cross-dressing postie Gilbert serves as a literal testament to ‘the things we do for love’. But it is the shocked Barbara, as she surveys the wreckage of her friendships with Nikki and her tenant, the destruction of her flat and her decorum, who helplessly asks, “What are we doing?” ★★★★☆ Simon Bishop
Rehearsal photos by John Swannell
