Charles Hutchinson reviews Ayckbourn’s Life Of Riley (From York Press)

Charles Hutchinson reviews Ayckbourn’s Life Of Riley

8:34am Thursday 23rd September 2010 in Theatre By Charles Hutchinson

Life Of Riley, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until October 16. Box office: 01723 370541.

LIVING the life of Riley may usually mean living easily without having to work hard, but in Alan Ayckbourn’s 74th play the life of Riley is about to be extinguished.

He has six months left on this mortal coil and, as it turns out, he will live it to the full, as he plots one final farewell to benefit his friends.

We never see George Riley, although he is omnipresent, affecting everything and everyone around him, in his function as a cipher.

Colin (Kim Wall) is the enervated doctor with the tactless tongue who accidentally lets slip George’s imminent fate to his gossiping wife Kathryn (Liza Goddard). Play-away self-made businessman Jack (Ben Porter) takes the news worse, his relationship already raw with model Essex wife Tamsin (Laura Doddington, in Posh Spice mode).

George’s wife, teacher Monica (Laura Howard) has not long walked out on him for the farming life with taciturn Simeon (Jamie Kenna) and is burdened with inevitable guilt.

George, meanwhile, blithely sails on, agreeing to step into an amateur production of Relatively Speaking (Ayckbourn’s first Scarborough play, in a nostalgic nod to his past, but one where the connection goes no deeper than being another Ayckbourn relationship comedy, although it allows him a few digs at his early writing style).

Not for the first time, aside from the unseen George, Ayckbourn’s men cut impotent, blinkered, earth-bound figures. Not for the first time either, the women are frustrated: Kathryn drinks in not-so-secret; Monica thought the fields would be greener on the other side; Tamsin knows her feckless husband is cheating. George has played a part in all their lives, a long time ago in Kathryn’s case and newly so for Tamsin at rehearsals, while the embers still burn in Monica.

One invitation, extended separately to all three, will bring matters to a head, but who is George? How old is he, and apart from his maverick streak, who really knows him? Not his friends; Jack, for example, tries a eulogy early on but talks about himself.

Not the audience members, busy filtering their own secrets and doubts into the play; and not the vicar at the funeral finale (voiced by Ayckbourn, incidentally), who admits he never knew him.

The ending – or what feels like several endings – is symptomatic of a rueful comedy that holds its aces back for the second half, but then plays the joker, only to switch to Tarot cards for the grim reaper’s call.

Ayckbourn has compared his new play to a pastoral symphony, and certainly it has its quiet moments, and the humour is wry, yet the very end is darker, amid tears and white flowers.

From feeling the relationships may pull through, the mood changes to fearing Ayckbourn’s cupboard of unhappy couples will be fuller than ever.

Pink Floyd’s ornate, heavy music seems a personal indulgence, but Ayckbourn’s cast is a delight again, just as they were in Communicating Doors, Goddard in particular.