Word: ayckbourn
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...FIRST SCENE OF WILDEST Dreams, a new tragicomedy staged by its prolific author, Alan Ayckbourn, for London's Royal Shakespeare Company, four unhappy middle-class people are enhancing dull lives with a homemade role- playing game a la Dungeons & Dragons. They speak pseudo Old English mingled with gobbledygook as their revealing fantasy characters -- a woman warrior for a young lesbian, a lizard with strange powers for a pimply computer nerd, a wise old seer for a tedious teacher and a princess who speaks in tongues for his faded, flustered wife -- obsess about visions and quests...
...Comedy relies on the gimmick of pretending that lights are out when they are on, so people stumble about in unintended sexual tangles while the audience chortles from the superiority of being able to see. It's possible to beguile audiences while amusing oneself with a formal problem -- Alan Ayckbourn does it all the time. But Ayckbourn remembers that comedy derives best from believable characters and situations that arouse empathy. However crowded Shaffer's stage, there's nobody home...
AUTHOR: ALAN AYCKBOURN...
...these people see themselves as morally normal -- and playwright Alan Ayckbourn, Britain's leading comedist, plainly thinks they are. Although the corruption depicted in A Small Family Business embraces fraud, the Mafia and murder, it takes place in bland, beige, suburban houses where the residents are preoccupied with recipes, hemlines and their dogs. And while the accents are recognizably British, the decor and, by implication, the bad behavior would seem right at home in Middle America...
...Jake Weber, in no way call to mind the U.S. style of mafiosi. And in the pivotal role of Jack, Brian Murray is a tower of Jell-O, reeking of insincerity from his entry, peevish rather than apocalyptic in uprooting family scandal. Director Lynne Meadow, who vastly improved on Ayckbourn's staging of his best play, Woman in Mind, here reduces a cry of outrage to an amiable snigger. The haunting final image, of the adolescent daughter frozen in narcotic guilt, becomes a mere echo of a deeper work that is otherwise nowhere to be seen...