Showing @ King’s theatre until Sat 16 Oct
Alan Aykbourn’s wry, witty and devastatingly middle-class play Bedroom Farce gently mocks those who marry for convenience, those who settle for second best and those who hide porn under the socks or think about floorboards while their partner is giving their “best performance”. But as we sit voyeuristically gazing at the three bedrooms and four issue-laden couples, the bleakness of the institution of marriage teeters delicately over the comic one-liners.
In bedroom one there’s Earnest (Bruce Montague) and Delia (Juliet Mills), the elderly couple who fit one another like comfy slippers. Bedroom two houses the playful, youthful and seemingly most well adjusted couple Malcolm (Ayden Callaghan) and Kate (Julia Mallam). Bedroom three is home to Jan and Nick (Max Caulfield) the pair who settled for second best. Then flitting between the bedrooms are Susannah and Trevor (Oliver Boot), the maladjusted duo who spend most of the play in tears or ripping each other’s hair out.
Let down only by a couple of one-note performances, Peter Hall’s ensemble production is a largely enjoyable affair. With Aykbourn’s words rolling off the tongues of Mills and Montague, the relationship between Susannah and Trevor is left to offer a more sombre portrait of marriage. As Susannah nervously mutters: “I am confident, I am attractive” when she thinks she’s alone, the tenderness of her self-conscious character comes out and we’re left thinking she should be alone to “find out who she is” as Delia wisely puts it. As the play develops, Aykbourn’s scorn for marriage really becomes apparent, as the young couples each appear to have committed too soon in order to fit into that middle-class ideal. Hardly updated, Bedroom Farce faces a few challenges in terms of relevance in 2010 but whilst attitudes towards marriage have changed since the 1970s, with the Con-Dem coalition rewarding married couples over single-parent families, it seems that Bedroom Farce holds a more sinister position as a grim glimpse at a future where once more relationships are only valued if they are legally binding regardless of personal happiness.