Theatre Review: Absent Friends, Daneside Theatre, Congleton

Absent Friends Daneside Theatre, Congleton

STAGE left: a pram. Enter, stage right, Paul, played by Michael Clowes. He crosses to the pram, peers into it, and asks if the contents are what's for dinner.

Now, perhaps I've missed something, but I don't find that particularly funny. And nor did the first night audience at Congleton Players' production of Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends.

Okay. Maybe a few restrained titters, but if anything a collective intake of breath that anyone would pass a remark so crass and improbable – and that a dramatist of the calibre, the dry wit and the understated comedy of Alan Ayckbourn would not have removed that line in any rewrite.

And that's the problem. Absent Friends isn't particularly amusing.

Despite Congleton Players' best endeavours, despite an attractive set used to advantage, the piece refuses to lift from the page.

Another example. Diana, played by Helen Sutton, tells how, as a child, she wanted a red coat because she wished to be a Canadian mountie. Eventually she collapses in hysterics and is led away to be sedated. And that's the last we see of her. Did anyone laugh? No.

Perhaps the production is not helped by the fact that the group of friends, supposedly of the same age, are played by people clearly of different generations.

This makes it difficult to believe that Paul and the taciturn Evelyn (Jenni Lee), mother of the "dinner", have had a fling.

Moreover, the tensions between the friends and their partners are apparent before the arrival of Colin (Martin Daniel). The fact that Colin has lost his fiancée through drowning, and that the others are more upset over the death than Colin himself and try not to mention it, is almost an anticlimax.

True, the traditional Ayckbourn themes of dysfunctional, flawed and lonely people lurk in the background of this production. However, they are rarely to the fore. The result is minor, muted Ayckbourn which fails to allow Congleton Players to give full voice.

Absent Friends is at the Daneside Theatre, Congleton, until Saturday, February 6. Tickets are available on 01260 271095.

Paul Gubbins