Time of my Life: Ayckbourn’s play is found lifeless
Alan Ayckbourn’s Time of my Life celebrated its 21st birthday at Warwick Arts Centre last week as part of the Ayckbourn Ensemble tour. However, after seeing the production, I couldn’t help but wonder why on earth he chose to revive it in the first place.
The play centres around Laura Stratton’s birthday in the family’s favourite restaurant. The birthday table sits atop a high platform; in come her sons Adam and Glyn, Adam’s girlfriend Maureen, Glyn’s wife Stephanie, and Laura’s husband Gerry. We proceed slowly through the evening’s events.
Two smaller tables feature on the main stage below the platform, both moving far quicker through a much larger expanse of time. One table shows us Stephanie and Glyn’s marriage, passing through years at a time, and the after effects of the evening that we are observing above. The other table goes backwards through the events leading up to the decision of Adam to bring his girlfriend Maureen to his mother’s birthday, going right back to the day they met.
As always, Ayckbourn is spot-on when it comes to dramatising family relationships and addressing class concerns, but Time of my Life just did not seem to ring true in so many other respects. We are familiarised with a tall waiter complete with a clown-like curly black wig and an awful ‘Italian’ accent that occasionally descends into the Yorkshire vernacular. The accent is of course meant to be terrible, but it is a shallow attempt at getting a few giggles out of the audience with the over-the-top-ness of it all.
Perhaps you could put it down to an intelligent political statement satirising how the Daily Mail-reading middle-classes viewed those who immigrated to the UK in the 1980s, with Ayckbourn criticising their apparent racism. But it just doesn’t stop. We are shown five or so ‘Italian’ waiters altogether, all with varying degrees of awful accents and different stereotypes. One character even descends into a farcical parody shamelessly crooning over the new couple. It simply comes across as cheap parody in poor taste.
As the female characters develop we are presented with recognisable, but not sympathetic, women – apart from perhaps poor Maureen. Laura is unmasked as emotionally manipulative, ignorant and selfish, insisting that her entire family circulates around her. The play itself certainly does, with the birthday event as the turning point, and for most of the play she is physically present at the birthday table, observing the development of the other two timelines from centre stage.
Then we meet Stephanie, the ‘nagging wife’ prototype, the husband ‘never does this or that for me’ she bemoans, exaggerating and manipulating stories so grotesquely you wonder what Glyn saw in her in the first place – possibly her similarity to his mother. Stephanie is a shallow, borderline anorexic who will not eat more than three spoonfuls of dinner. Towards the end of the production (spoiler alert) as she steps in with a new haircut and a glamorous new set of clothes, the male characters onstage are agog. And how did dowdy Stephanie emerge as a beautiful swan? ‘I don’t eat lunch anymore,’ she says. Yet another attempt at satire falls flat, and instead we cannot help but draw the link between starvation, skinniness and beauty. With no real redeeming female characters, it is a play that is hard to like.
Between irritating models of femininity, awful stereotyping and (granted, probably unintentional) idealising of eating disorders, I found myself somewhere between bored and annoyed the majority of the way through. I sadly found myself asking ‘And? So what?’ throughout the entire production, disappointed with such an esteemed playwright, and I could not convince myself to care past the interval curtain.
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