RolePlay
Justin has an alcoholic mother from Surrey; Julie’s parents are bigoted garden centre owners from Doncaster. Tonight is the first time they will all meet one another, with the mismatched couple of Julie and Justin poised to announce their engagement. As if that wasn’t enough of a recipe for disaster, Paige from upstairs literally drops in via the balcony, soon joined by her gun-toting minder Micky.
RolePlay is the third play in Alan Ayckbourn’s Damsels in Distress trilogy, all three set in a flat in London’s Docklands (at different times in 2001; the characters in each play have no other connections). For avid Adelaide theatregoers, the setting might be familiar: St. Jude’s tackled the first play (GamePlan) earlier this year. Both have similar themes of class differences played out in the style of an English farce, but each has its own darker edge that cuts beneath the wit: GamePlan was the naïve descent into prostitution, driven by the desperate need for money; RolePlay deals with the faces we wear when we’re with others, the roles we play because we believe that’s what others want to see (or we think they want to see).
Nicole Walker is Julie – or Julie-Ann, as she insists she is called in the presence of her parents – who flits around the flat, panicking over the seating arrangement and a lost dessert fork. Walker succeeds in scenes with her parents, desperate to please them at any expense. Nick Endenburg is Justin, the non-confrontational boyfriend, and Endenburg excels at the reaction, the non-verbal communication explaining surprise, bewilderment, and attraction to one of the two people in the room without pretences: Paige.
Kaila Barton takes on the role of the ex-dancer and regretful girlfriend of the unseen gangster. From her appearance on the balcony, she oozes a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude to everyone else. Paige has the widest emotional range of all the characters in RolePlay and Barton nails the extremes, though her speeches could be more convincing.
Theresa (Lilly) Dolman laps up the wonderful role of Justin’s mother, Arabella, the second character that doesn’t pretend to be anyone else – though that’s largely because she’s too drunk to remember who she’s supposed to be. Though her brandy haze impacts her memory of who is who, sometimes she is the voice of the audience, saying out loud what we’re thinking from our seats.
Gigi Jeffers enjoys herself as Julie(-Ann)’s mother, Dee, a Doncastrian proud yet seemingly oblivious of her homophobic and racist husband (John Hudson). And Tim Cousins does well to play hardnosed Micky straight, yet without sufficient menace for us to be truly fearful of what he might be.
This theatre company is famous for its sets, often for farce, that combine more doors than should be possible on this stage, but thankfully, this set is simple and functional, designed and built by the production team. Lighting is utilitarian and sound is excellent (both by Mike Phillips), the ringing of phones and doorbells perfectly complementing the performers and set.
It’s an entertaining production, occasionally laugh-out-loud, but there’s something missing: there’s little subtext, almost no exploration of the class differences that Ayckbourn wanted to expose. The mother-daughter relationships are well played: Dee having the same phrases and anxieties as her daughter Julie-Ann; and Arabella having considerable character similarities to the (unrelated) Paige. There are recognisable family dynamics of a child wanting to be his and her own person, rather than a reflection of their parents, yet there are more narrative turns left untouched. Director Robert Andrews nudges his cast through the lines, but it can feel a bit loose in their delivery, as if they’re responding to the silence, rather than reacting to the words. The second act is tighter when all the cast are together on stage, when timing amongst the seven performers is more important, but its momentum isn’t sustained to the comical denouement, where I hoped to feel more for the closing decisions of the characters.
If you’re looking for an exposé of the fallacies of class defining your character, this isn’t it: it’s played lightly and without enough shade; but it is sufficiently humorous and engaging at face value.
Mark Wickett
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