BWW Reviews: SEASON'S GREETINGS, The National Theatre, January 13 2011

Alan Ayckbourn is the grand old man of British theatre, though he would probably quibble at both those adjectives, pointing out that he is younger than fellow knights Jonathan Miller and Peter Hall, and that his home is not really on the vast stages of the National Theatre, but in his own tiny Library Theatre in Scarborough. But with a CV covering 52 years as a playwright and having racked up 74 plays, there's little he doesn't know about tuning into middle-class insecurities on the one hand and the craft of theatre on the other.

Revived 30 years on from its original (Scarborough) production, Season's Greetings is set in a comfortable family house in the country that, in the pressure cooker environment that only Christmas can produce, is transformed into a prison. With the male occupants investing their emotional energies into their businesses, their hobbies, even their comic books, the women are starved of the oxygen of love that keeps relationships breathing, rather than spluttering. Because these men and women are English, middle-class and we're in pre-Oprah, pre-Diana 1980, everyone is too tongue-tied to talk honestly about their grim internal lives and instead, put on a brave face, you know, get by, you know, things aren't so bad - much to be grateful for etc etc etc. The two exceptions to this hopeless complicity in impoverished love and sex are the semi-outsiders - the child-like pensioner Uncle Harvey and the youthful, not-quite-boyfriend-yet writer, Clive. The old man doesn't accept the unwritten rules of how the household does Christmas and the young man doesn't know (and wouldn't care if he did). Through their actions, the relationships' fault lines are exposed and the blame game starts. They pay a stiff price for their indiscipline too

There's plenty of laughs, and a few grimaces, with the audience recognising their own shortfalls in moral courage as the characters fail repeatedly to address their complacency. Catherine Tate vamps it up as housewife / femme fatale Beverley enjoying some fine physical comedy with Oliver Chris' smooth and self-serving Clive. Mark Gatiss is spectacularly hopeless as Bernard pouring all his frustrations into his annual puppet show in lieu of bringing any actual children. Even as big a set as this one is often dominated by the simmering malevolence of David Troughton's Harvey, comic and chilling - a scary clown without the make-up.

Season's Greetings is of its time, with echoes of the great situation comedies of the 70s. As is the case for Fawlty Towers, Rising Damp and Steptoe and Son, whether one views the work as tragedy or comedy is more a matter of taste than anything intrinsic to the script. However, the writerly craft displayed within rigorously structured convention that characterised those sitcoms and this play and is a key to their success, feels confining from today's perspective. In the thirty years since Ayckbourn plotted the action, comedy has become much looser, whether in the animated world of The Simpsons or the voyeurs' world of The Office. The sharp observations of middle class, middle aged mores cut as deeply in 2011 as they did in 1980, but younger audiences may just feel an intrusive hand at work, as Ayckbourn choreographs his characters' progression from room to room, as the walls close in on the bittersweet pleasure that is a family Christmas

 

Season's Greetings continues at The National Theatre until March 13.

 

 

 

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