5 – 10 May
With 90 Alan Ayckbourn plays to choose from, you might ask what is it about Just Between Ourselves that director Michael Cabot feels is worthy of a national tour? Yes, it remains a 1970’s parable of the perils of the marriage trap and the suburban working-class woman’s lot – thwarted careers because of unequal shares in family life – frustrated emotional lives with sensitivety limited men. But while we are asked to admire Ayckbourn’s ability to portray the mundane and find big truths hiding in plain sight, somehow now the writing fails to ignite much sympathy for its characters in what feels like too limp a trajectory towards its genuinely sad conclusion. The play’s one moment of levity veers to the farcical and fails to relieve an otherwise plain script which seems to hinder rather than help a professional cast, never funny or bitter enough to leave a deeper impression.
Written apparently during the winter months of 1975, the season’s darkness has certainly pervaded Ayckbourn’s take on marriage. In Dennis (Tom Richardson) we have a man who is still in thrall to his deceased dad, seeking to recreate the happy birthday surprises of his youth in a garage that houses an ageing Mini and is festooned with his father’s old tools. Richardson injects Dennis with some Eric Idle-type ‘nudge nudge’ vocal styling while he does his best to infuriate with his inability to acknowledge the crisis developing under his nose. People just need to be able to laugh at themselves more, like he does.
His mentally fragile wife Vera (Holly Smith) despairs of meaningful dialogue with the man who prefers to spend hours alone mending and making things than taking an interest in her. But Smith’s portrayal of Vera’s impending breakdown seems to rely rather more on her clumsiness onstage than in any subtlety in the writing.
Also living in the house is Dennis’s mother Marjorie (Connie Walker), turning the ripe old age of 67. She is only too happy to join in the sport of putting Vera in her place with her superpower ability to make birthday cakes – her trump card – proof that she holds the keys to her son’s affections in a performance arguably more at home in a TV sit-com.
Into this dis-functional world arrives the indecisive neighbour Neil (Joseph Clowser) looking to buy the mini on behalf of his wife Pam (Helen Phillips). As Dennis repeatedly drops the price of the mini to get it off his hands, so it seems, in parallel, Vera’s condition deteriorates. Phillips’ spirited portrayal of dissatisfaction with her weak-willed husband and her own missed professional opportunities is one of the show’s better moments.
Elizabeth Wright’s well-designed set reveals the inside of Dennis’s garage. Lit within by two strip lights, a sparkling green Austin mini takes centre stage, together with a work bench and do-it-yourself detritus spread around it. The non-functioning up-and-over door at one end and a sticky door at the other point effectively to Dennis’s lax attitude to getting anything done. Problems stay problems in his laugh-at-life world.
★★☆☆☆ Simon Bishop, 6 May 2025
Photography credit: Will Green Photography
