| All the reviews
featured on this page are for the world premiere of the play. All reviews are the copyright of the respective publication.
Note: It is worth bearing in mind that
the original production of Private Fears In Public Places received a largely lukewarm
reception from British critics. Only when the same production (with an
unaltered script and a largely unchanged cast) opened in New York a year
later to rapturous reviews (in particular from The New York Times), did it
begin to gain a more positive response from British critics in later
productions.
Private Fears In Public Places (by
Quentin Letts)
"Few things are more wrenching, on the first night after a family member has
died, than the sight of his pyjamas.
Perhaps this is a terribly English thing to say, a distinctly English detail
to note, but I know it to be true. Horribly true.
In Sir Alan Ayckbourn's latest masterly filleting of the English mind one of
his characters silently holds a dead man's pyjamas and realises the things
are no longer needed. In that moment - wham! - the loneliness hits home.
The reason Ayckbourn's plays are so strong - and this latest, premiered last
night, is no exception - is that he gently shows us English who we are.
There are few histrionics. Just quiet, wry observations which lead an
audience to greater self-knowledge.
Private Fears in Public Places makes for a super night out, offering
laughs and the occasional tug of a tear.
It features a Sloaney girl whose engagement to a prune-chinned former Army
officer is going wrong in the classic English, unspoken manner. Melanie
Gutteridge, as the Sloane, has the sharpest of accents and the tightest of
inner rubber-bands. Yet she never quite snaps. Women of her class must not.
Her Army boyfriend (Stephen Beckett) is dim almost beyond credibility. A
little less mustard on that lump of beef, I'd advise.
Musing on the difference between the sexes, he says women go round in gangs
and never stop talking. `That's why they don't make ideal astronauts,' he
says.
Around the crumbling engagement circulate other lonely lives: a bereaved
hotel barman, a Bible basher with a dark secret and a
quiet little estate agent who lives with his toothy spinster sister.
The latter is superbly done by Paul Kemp, bringing out the polite melancholy
of English suburbia.
Throughout the play there are half-completed sentences as characters
struggle with their embarrassment. Half-finished sentences, half-lived
lives.
Lofty aesthetes sometimes sneer at Ayckbourn. So what. This man knows his
way round Middle England better than a Sutton Coldfield cabbie."
(Daily Mail, 18 August 2004)
Private Fears In Public Places (by John
Peter)
"This is minor Ayckbourn, which is like saying: "This is only an 18-carat
diamond." It has six characters in search of a life, and its short scenes
overlap and interlock. Nicola (Melanie Gutteridge) is a cut-glass bitch
getting impatient with her lover, Dan (Stephen Beckett), an army officer
cashiered for incompetence. Their estate agent (Paul Kemp) watches porn
videos lent by his colleague Charlotte (Billie-Claire Wright), which appals
his spinster sister, Imogen (Sarah Moyle). Meanwhile, Imogen meets Dan,
through personals, in his favourite hotel bar; the barman (Adrian McLoughlin)
employs Charlotte as a part-time carer for his dying father, and she makes,
er, quite an impact. This may sound complex, but it isn't. Ayckbourn's
construction has a masterly clarity; his writing combines ruthless
observation with mature tolerance. Nobody else writing today can create a
sense of a complicated little world in 90 minutes, or make banal lives seem
so unforgivably interesting. Listen: it's a master's voice."
(Sunday Times, 29 August 2004)
Private Fears In Public Places (by
Alfred Hickling)
"Here's one to baffle future Ayckbourn scholars. Ten years ago, Ayckbourn
announced a play about farewells and departures to be called Private
Fears in Public Places, but abandoned the idea and wrote
Communicating Doors instead.
Whatever happened to that original play remains a mystery, because this is
clearly not it. The revised Private Fears - Ayckbourn's second new
offering of the summer is an enigmatic piece about failure and forgiveness,
appended to a title that was clearly too good to waste.
Nicola and Dan are well-heeled, hearty types whose desperate flat-hunting
belies the fact that their relationship is falling apart. Stewart, their
timid estate agent, whiles away the evenings watching television while his
equally lonely sister Imogen endures a disappointing round of dating agency
assignments. Ambrose, a mordant bartender, is stuck at home with his ailing
dad, while the home-help, Charlotte, is a scary Christian fundamentalist
with a sideline in erotic dancing.
Played over a taut 90 minutes, without an interval, the action flits
stealthily through a skein of hints and ambiguities towards a revelation
that never quite arrives. Dan has been drummed out of the army for an
unexplained misdemeanour. Ambrose is in thrall to an abusive father,
possibly because he's gay. And it's never made explicit how the
Bible-wielding Charlotte holds down so many jobs at the same time.
One suspects that Charlotte holds the key to the work, though Billie-Claire
Wright never quite locates the lock. There's an outstanding comic set piece
in which Stephen Beckett's Dan and Sarah Moyle's Imogen pair up on a drunken
blind date; but as a study of the pains of unfulfillment, the play feels
strangely unfulfilling."
(The Guardian, 20 August 2004)
Private Fears In Public Places (by Dave
Windass)
"This is not the first time that Alan Ayckbourn has demonstrated the
influence that the world of film has had upon his work. This is a highly
cinematic piece which reveals how six lives interweave by jump-cutting and
dissolving through seven days of action.
Like Comic Potential (Buster Keaton-style slapstick), How the
Other Half Loves (Mike Figgis at his split screen best) and a host of
others, this new work, set in London, shows that Ayckbourn's mind works in
flashing, brilliant, moving pictures. In this instance, however, the overall
concept and the theme of the struggle of combating the constant fear of
growing old and lonely is, perhaps, better than the storytelling.
Thanks to the miracle of Mick Hughes' lighting rather than the gamut of set
changes that more than 50 scenes would appear to dictate, the action takes
place in various flats, an office, sitting room, kitchen, cafe and the hotel
bar where Stephen Beckett's hooray Henry of a disgraced soldier, Dan, is
taking refuge from his pushy princess of a partner Nicola (Melanie
Gutteridge). He tells all to barman Ambrose, played by Adrian McLoughlin, an
essentially shy man struggling to care for his obnoxious father.
Ambrose drafts in the sex-mad Charlotte (Billie-Claire Wright) to help out,
which she does in a rather unorthodox manner. Charlotte also works for the
same estate agent as Paul Kemp's ultra-nervous Stewart, brother of lonely
Imogen, the comedically awesome Sarah Moyle.
With three strong female performers, Ayckbourn's ability to write quality
parts for women shines once again. But like life itself, there are a few too
many loose strands left dangling at the end for this to be a wholly
satisfying piece, even with such interesting staging."
(The Stage, 2 November 2004)
Ayckbourn Cast Tied Up In Emotional Knots
(by Charles Hutchinson)
"The six actors who opened the Stephen Joseph Theatre summer season in one
Alan Ayckbourn premiere close the Scarborough summer back where they
started: the same six in another Ayckbourn premiere, having learned more
about each other and themselves.
This symmetry is reprised by the characters in Private Fears In Public
Places: six self-contained, insular, stymied lives end back where they
began. Each is still in search of a move upwards and onwards, some of them
are no happier, shackled by past or present circumstance.
Ayckbourn says the theme of his grave, emotionally-knotted play is the
knock-on effect that our individual actions have upon another person,
sometimes a complete stranger.
"We may not even be aware of this," he says. "Nonetheless, we are all of us
linked; we are all related. And whether we like it or not, none of us can
truly stand alone or indeed remain aloof or immune."
He sets the play in London, the metropolis where loneliness can feel
heightened, as the dodgem cars on life's highway go about their speeding
business all around you. Together with designer Pip Leckenby, he presents
five initially lifeless settings; a sofa and table; an office desk and
chair; an hotel bar and two chairs; and two sets of table and chairs (one of
which will double as a flat and bar). Some are
private, others are public, and fears will be exposed in all of them.
Stewart (Paul Kemp) is a couch-potato estate agent, stuck on precooked TV
dinners and struck on the lithe receptionist, Charlotte (Billie-Claire
Wright), at his office. He may deal in moving for a living but he frets over
making a move on her.
His sense of inadequacy is palpable, and his sister, Imogen (Sarah Moyle),
is no more self-confident, for all her pretence of meeting up with the girls
for a drink each evening she leaves their shared flat.
Charlotte, a practising Christian with an alarming smile, is a strange one:
her overbearing relationship with God and the Bible has her looking after
the curmudgeonly, bedridden father of barman Ambrose (Adrian McLoughlin)
each night, yet she delights in sexually taunting Stewart with home-made
porn videos. Where others are dysfunctional, she is malfunctioning.
Repressed gay barman Ambrose, once dominated by his mother, now tied to his
Alf Garnett father, spends his day half-listening to the rambling thoughts
of Dan (Stephen Beckett). Discharged without honour from his father's
beloved Army, Dan is at a loss what to do next beyond ordering the next
drink. He and his brusque Sloane Street fiancée (Melanie Gutteridge) have
lost interest in each other.
This is a slow-burning psycho-drama, with no interval to interrupt the flow,
and the comedy is discomfiting, the characters empathetic, and the playing
of Beckett and Moyle particularly good."
(Yorkshire Evening Press, 18 August 2004) |
|
The reception to Private Fears In Public Places American
premiere at the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, New York,
could not have been more different to the British reception. Not only did
the play itself generate extraordinary reviews, but the American critics
seemed to better grasp the play itself than most of their British
counter-parts. It is debateable why this is the case, but it would seem fair
to suggest that American critics are not weighed down by preconceptions of
Alan Ayckbourn and his plays.
The
New York Times, arguably the most influential reviewer on Broadway, gave an
extensive and extraordinary review of Private Fear In Public Places which is
reprinted here.
New York Times (Charles Isherwood)
Private
Fears in Public Places
has sneaked into New York almost unheralded… as the jewel in the crown of
the Brits Off Broadway festival. A minor-key comedy about six Londoners
leading lives of quiet desperation, it is rueful, funny, touching and
altogether wonderful. It runs only through July 3, which would break my
heart if Sir Alan and his fine company hadn't already done the job.
The
production marks the United States debut of Sir Alan's repertory troupe from
the Stephen Joseph Theater in Scarborough, England, where virtually all of
his plays have had their premieres. The sensitivity and simplicity of the
performances on view here inspire the fanciful thought that Scarborough
should be anointed a Mecca for admirers of first-rate, frill-free acting.
I'm ready to make a pilgrimage if this production represents the company's
everyday standard.
Sir Alan is
a comic playwright; he has often been called, half-disparagingly, Britain's
Neil Simon. But he has written in a wide variety of comic modes, from
traditional farces to comedies of manners to ruminative character studies.
In his weaker plays he has often relied on gimmickry to gussy up rote essays
on love and other domestic problems of the British middle classes.
House
and
Garden,
for instance, the last Ayckbourn plays to be seen in a major New York
production, were performed in adjoining theaters by the same cast
simultaneously.
But there is
virtually no artifice in
Private
Fears in Public Places.
(Private
Lives
would have been a more apt and economical title, but that was taken.) A
delicate play with the transparent texture of a piece of chamber music, it
comprises dozens of brief scenes, most with no obvious comic payoff. Some
are wordless tableaus: a woman sitting alone in a cafe, shrinking sadly into
a cappuccino cup, a man moored in an armchair before a flickering television
screen, lost in wonder at what he sees before him.
For
audiences used to comedy that grabs you by the throat, if not in more
private places, patience may be needed, but it is richly rewarded. By the
end of this intermissionless evening, these quiet, loosely overlapping
scenes gradually cohere to compose a collective portrait of contemporary
urban isolation that feels uncommonly wise and tender and true.
The
characters are two-a-penny types drawn with fine brush strokes. Stewart
(Paul Kemp) is a meek real estate agent who shares a flat with his sister
Imogen (Sarah Moyle), a receptionist. Imogen, a little lumpen and, like
Stewart, sliding inexorably into middle age, answers personal ads,
disguising her generally unsuccessful forays as nights out with the girls.
On a lucky evening she meets the handsome, hunky Dan (Paul Thornley), an
ex-army officer who was recently kicked out of his flat by his frustrated
girlfriend, Nicola (Melanie Gutteridge). She's tired of waiting for him to
get his life in gear.
The links
between characters are forged by everyday circumstance, not the mechanics of
dramaturgy. Until Dan and Nicola separated, they were shown apartments by
Stewart, for instance, while Dan's days before and after the breakup are
spent exchanging desultory chat with Ambrose (Adrian McLoughlin), the barman
at a nearby hotel. The play's sixth character, Sir Alan's most peculiar, is
Stewart's prim assistant, Charlotte (Alexandra Mathie), who moonlights as a
caregiver for the elderly and is hired by Ambrose to spend nights tending to
his abusive, bedbound father.
Charlotte's
beatific smile and her ever-at-hand Bible belie a secret life that she
accidentally -- or perhaps not accidentally -- divulges to Stewart when she
lends him a videotape of an inspirational program she admires. Stewart,
armchair-bound and pushing his grocery-store dinner around the plate, lets
the tape run on, only to hear the uplifting tones pointing the path to
happiness give way to moans of sexual delight: Can it be that Charlotte has
a taste for hardcore porn?
The
ramifications of this revelation provide some of the play's more pointedly
comic moments, but Sir Alan never allows his humour to warp the humanity of
his characters. Charlotte's dilemma -- the inner battle she wages daily
between her sexual impulses and the flesh-denying dictates of her beliefs --
is merely a more absurd version of the conflicts besetting all the
characters. Each struggles with the problem of how and when secret anxieties
and hopes should be divulged to friends, lovers and strangers, what must be
risked to forge the connections that sustain life and give it richness.
Sir Alan's
flawless cast amplifies the emotional impact of his writing in variously
subtle and hilarious ways. All of the performers here respect and understand
the depth in the spareness of his writing, the economy that is a welcome
consequence of his long experience as a playwright. Sir Alan may have
nothing left to prove, but clearly he has much yet to say.
Copyright: Charles Isherwood / New York Times |
