Show & Tell: World Premiere Reviews
This page features a selection of reviews from the world premiere of Alan Ayckbourn's Show & Tell at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, during autumn 2024. All reviews are copyright of the respective organisation. A full list of reviews can be found on the Further Reading page.Ayckbourn's 90th Is A Joy (by Dominic Maxwell)
It's often asked how Shakespeare knew so much. Watching Alan Ayckbourn stage his 90th play, 65 years after his 1959 debut, and watching him again find an innovative form for eternal truths about human caprice, vulnerability and the need to connect, I have to wonder how one 85-year-old playwright still knows so much about holding an audience.
I won't pretend that Show & Tell is a match for the masterpieces in his canon, many of them decades old. It's stately in its set-up. It could easily be shorter. Sometimes, as one character explains their past to another, it commits the should-be-cardinal sin of telling more than showing. Yet I'm rarely bored by an Ayckbourn comedy, and I certainly wasn't by either the play proper or by the knowingly ropey play-within-a-play French farce the characters end up staging amid the faded grandeur of the Yorkshire home of retired department store bigwig Jack.
He asks Homelight, a struggling theatre company that stages plays in people’s homes, to put on a birthday treat for his wife. Cantankerous Jack is in the grips of dementia, though, and relies on his ageing carer Ben to look after him. Could it be that the frustrated, bullied, stagestruck Ben will eventually get to act in the play? You don't doubt it for a second. Yet the execution is divine. Paul Kemp as Ben looks like a cross between Steve Pemberton and Derek Jacobi, and performs with their level of skill as he dons fancy garb and accent to let Ben excel on stage as he can't in life. Kevin Jenkins's set is artfully stuffed with old furniture, yet Ayckbourn’s production finds room for telling moments for all its characters. If Richard Stacey's actor character Peter is coarsened in the second half for storytelling purposes, he cuts a sympathetic figure in the first as he tries to figure out his caustic new client. As Jack, Bill Champion plays entitled ire to the hilt but is a joy to watch as he in turn watches the farce that unfolds before him.
Will Jack pick up on how this art imitates his life? No: as usual for modern Ayckbourn, the show is a polish or two shy of joining all its dots. Yet as Frances Marshall's beleaguered actor-manager Harry holds her dysfunctional company together, as Olivia Woolhouse’s truculent actress Steph lightens up once allowed centre stage, the magic of performance is explored and vindicated. It's an amusing, warming evening. How does he keep doing it?
(The Times, 11 September 2024)
Alan Ayckbourn’s clever, very funny 90th play (by Clare Brennan)
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?
As ever, Ayckbourn does not present his audience with ideas, but with people trying to work their way through situations that both are and are not of their own making. An elderly man, Jack, wants to surprise his wife on her birthday; his friend, Ben, is helping him. A struggling theatre company that specialises in performing plays in people’s homes is touting for custom. Is their comedy what Jack is looking for?
As the action progresses (rather bumpily, in the first half), we discover that Jack’s marriage is not as he presents it; bashful Ben has hidden depths; the theatre company is riven by ideological clashes as well as being an actor short of the full troupe.
In the tradition of it’ll be alright on the night, the show does go on. It’s very funny. We can laugh and enjoy it just for what it is. Dramaturgically speaking, though, something more is happening. By presenting a comedy set in a drawing room within drawing room, on the SJT’s 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.
A five-strong cast realises Ayckbourn’s vision, which he directs. Each performs admirably, but special mention to Olivia Woolhouse on a sprightly professional debut and to Paul Kemp who, in the linchpin role of Ben, is simply magnificent.
(The Observer, 15 September 2024)
Ayckbourn’s Latter-Day Lear Blusters Around the Front Room (by Mark Fisher)
If, like Alan Ayckbourn, you had 89 plays under your belt, what would your worst nightmare be? Could anything be scarier than reaching your 90th only to find no audience left to watch it? Worse, what if the few who did pay attention found it irrelevant? What if it seemed like a relic from another era, as dated as a polemical 1960s drama from Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 or a sexist French farce from the days of weekly rep?
That 90th play is Show & Tell and although its principal character, Jack, is a retired managing director of a department store, he carries something of the impotent fury of King Lear, if not the fading magic of Prospero. Played by Bill Champion with a mix of suaveness, bluster and dementia-related violence, he is a king without a domain, as ineffectual as a playwright without a theatre.
In a gesture as romantic as it is delusional, Jack books the Homelight theatre company to perform a “sprightly comedy” called A Friend Indeed in his house as a birthday surprise for his wife. It becomes apparent, however, that the guests – wife, family, former heads of department – are figments of his imagination. A light domestic comedy about the misunderstandings of a doddery old man starts to turn into an absurdist drama in the style of Ionesco’s The Chairs.
The itinerant players whose performance of A Friend Indeed takes up the entire fourth act (just because Ayckbourn can) are not six characters in search of an author, but three actors in search of an audience.
In a play where everything is performative, the infidelities of French farce mirror the more truthful failings of Jack’s marriage. The owner whose slogan was “you matter” treated his staff with the same contempt as he did the wife he claims to dote on. Meanwhile, his former colleague Ben (a stand-out performance by Paul Kemp) is a chameleon with an actor’s instinct never to be the man you think he is.
As a play, it is slow burning, inconsistently funny and unresolved, but it is also strange and haunting; a compromise, as one of the actors puts it, between “something they quite enjoy” and “something you’re reasonably proud of”.
(The Guardian, 12 September 2024)
Farce that proves Ayckbourn's still pin-sharp at 85 (by Patrick Marmion)
Sir Alan Ayckbourn is surely the Sir Geoffrey Boycott of British Theatre. OK, so AA isn't Yorkshire born or bred, but he has made the seaside town of Scarborough synonymous with his work over the past 65 years.
Not only that, Ayckbourn's stats have come to resemble Boycott's cricket scores. At 85, he has just effortlessly clipped his 90th play, Show & Tell, for four. He surely merits his own Wisden Almanack, to record his work.
This latest is about Jack Bothridge, truculent former owner of a department store founded by his grandfather. Since becoming a widower, Jack has drifted into hallucinogenic dementia in which he imagines his long-departed wife is still at his side. In honour of her birthday, he's arranged for a French farce to be performed at their manor house. As you do. 'She was always dragging me to the theatre,' Jack recalls, wistfully... 'I've slept beside her through the best of it.'
The deceptively simple plot hinges on whether the on-off show will indeed go on, or off. But after Jack is visited by an actor who he mistakes for a meter-reader, the action craftily mixes his delusions with the theatrical illusions of the shoestring theatre company.
Bill Champion's Jack is a marvellous curmudgeon: a man who 'never brooked contradiction at work and has developed the impression he's infallible' (in other words, a cast-iron Yorkshireman).
But it's Paul Kemp, as his downtrodden de-facto carer and ex-colleague Ben, who steals the show. A mixture of Les Dennis and John Inman from Are You Being Served?, Ben nurses a colourful secret behind his mousy facade.
Ayckbourn directs the play himself, and his instincts are still pin-sharp. I understand he has various projects on the go. Steadily notching them up in singles, just like our Geoffrey. What chance a century?
(Daily Mail, 13 September 2024)
Alan Ayckbourn’s 90th play, Show & Tell (by Charles Hutchinson)
In the words of Alan Ayckbourn, "Show & Tell is about something which has preoccupied me for the last 60 years and probably more – theatre.”
In those years, the Scarborough writer-director has chalked up 90 plays – and still more are on their way. His SJT play for 2026 is written already and he is part way through 2027’s premiere too.
Play number 90, Show & Tell, is a “love letter to theatre”: the joy of theatre, the pleasure of writing and directing for Ayckourn at 85; the abiding delight for his audience in his abiding wit, social and cultural observation, foresight and insight, mischief-making and rug-pulling darker undercurrents.
Show & Tell is among his most playful in its celebration of the possibilities presented by ‘the play’ as an artform, here refracted through a backward glance at its back pages and his own too. A play full of play and full of plays, and indeed a play within a play.
All this is wrapped up in dark farce that “lifts the lid on the performances we act out on a daily basis,” as Sir Alan puts it. How much do we “show and tell”; how much do we conceal?
In this case, retired West Yorkshire managing director Jack Bothridge (grizzled, irascible Ayckbourn regular Bill Champion) has invited Homelight Theatre Company actor Peter Reeder (Richard Stacey) to the Bothridge family hall to tie up arrangements for a birthday party performance for his wife.
Unfortunately, belligerent Jack has no recollection of making any arrangements, mistaking the unnerved Peter Reeder for a meter reader. What’s more, Jack is not so much forgetful as in the incipient stages of dementia, in a hinterland between assertive clarity and confusion, as Ayckbourn exposes the misogyny, gruff bluntness, delusion and self-entitlement born of running a family business often on a capricious whim.
Champion is in terrific form here as a latter-day Lear, while Ayckbourn’s study of the generation that soils and spoils a family business is spot on in a nod to Ibsen and Arthur Miller. Look at Jack’s bullying treatment of Ben Wilkes (Paul Kemp), who ran his formal clothing department and is now his carer, outwardly as loyal as Lear’s Gloucester.
However, there is much more to the reserved Wilkes than first meets the eye, caught wonderfully by Kemp, the essence of the gradual “show and tell” in Show & Tell. His shattering revelation, told to the sympathetic ear of actress and company manager Harriet ‘Harry’ Golding (Frances Marshall) is a gem of a quietly detonating scene.
Kemp’s Wilkes becomes embroiled in the other side of the story: Ayckbourn’s depiction of the world of theatre, past and present. Through the tribulations of the ailing Homelight Theatre Company, desperately in need of Jack’s booking, Ayckbourn hones in on the dramas faced by companies post-Covid, the struggle to draw an audience, the battle between artistic ambition and exigency.
He comments too on the fad for changing a company name to meet changing times, in this instance from the pioneering Front Room Theatre to the more inclusive-sounding Homelight. He duly recalls the groundbreaking days of Centre 42, the radical project of Arnold Wesker and Charles Parker, one said to have “inflicted the most damage on theatre since Cromwell”.
Act Two recalls Ayckbourn’s 1984 play A Chorus Of Disapproval in going behind the scenes, but crucially too it draws on Ayckbourn’s earliest days at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, directing a French farce in 1961 when artistic director Stephen Joseph told him his budget was “technically nothing…and if you push me, £5”.
In theatre tradition, by now joined by Olivia Woolhouse’s insouciant actress Steph Tate, Kemp’s Wilkes steps in when needs must, the cue for Stacey’s exasperated Reeder to act like a spoiled child in the read-through and Kemp to scene-steal gloriously.
What follows this character-revealing shenanigans is the play within the play: a full-scale French farce, A Friend Indeed, in Ayckbourn’s knowing pastiche of the art-form, played straight but inherently over-the-top in full period costume.
Theatre laid bare, life laid bare, warts and all, yet delivered with a love of the stage that never dims.
(charlershutchpress.co.uk, 13 September 2024)
All reviews are copyright of the respective publication / author.