Watching Alan Ayckbourn’s 1976 tragicomedy is like falling into a portal in which wives quietly have nervous breakdowns as they cook and clean, husbands tinker in garages to get away from them and mother-in-laws rule the roost.
A cramped garage is an apt setting for this domestic grubbiness as two working-class couples meet, become friends, celebrate birthdays and variously unravel into marital malaise or mental breakdown. The old banger of a Mini in the garage is what triggers the drama: Dennis (Tom Richardson) is trying to sell it, and Neil (Joseph Clowser), callow and dyspeptic, turns up for a viewing, hoping to buy it for his dissatisfied, heavy drinker of a wife, Pam (Helen Phillips). Dennis is every bit the shifty secondhand car salesman in this opening scene, while his nervy wife, Vera (Holly Smith), and battleaxe mother, Marjorie (Connie Walker), make cups of tea around the men.
They seem like recognisable characters from TV sitcoms of their day (from Till Death Us Do Part to George and Mildred) but slowly take on darker shades as if Ayckbourn is skewering stock types. Dennis is a proto-mansplainer, unable to express emotion or support his unravelling wife. Neil is something of a proto new man in the early throes of masculine crisis – he has a wife that wants independence while he feels pressure to be the breadwinner. Both marriages are built on agonising compromises, yet the register is ostensibly light and clearly in imitation of the era’s TV comedies.
Under the direction of Michael Cabot, the tone wavers uncertainly, awkward and undercharged, and the drama plays out like Abigail’s Party but without the savage laughs. Pam is the most rounded character and compassionately drawn in her itch to be something in the world. It is a shame the others feel so flimsy: Vera’s breakdown looks like an overdone cliche, Marjorie is a comic monster and Dennis remains emotionally impenetrable. At least Neil is made vulnerable but little is tied up or carried through, from the hasty resolution around his marital woes to the money-losing scheme suggested to him by Dennis.
A kitchen sink drama in a garage, it may well have been revelatory to 1970s audiences in dramatising the trap of marriage for women and the trap of masculinity for men – under the cover of comedy. But the blend of domestic light and dark does not pack the punch it should here. It has also been long since finessed by TV soap operas. Ayckbourn might have been a forerunner to EastEnders, and maybe that is this play’s accomplishment but it looks and sounds rather too much like a museum piece now.
• At Theatre Royal Windsor until 5 April. Then touring until 12 July.
