Brighton Year-Round 2024

For Entertainment Purposes Only

Lewes Little Theatre

Genre: Comedy, Contemporary, Drama, Live Music, Musical Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Lewes Little Theatre, Lancaster Street

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

A revelation. We’ve not encountered Philip Ayckbourn’s gifts as songwriter and musical arranger. For Entertainment Purposes Only directed by him and Shaun Hughes at its Lewes Little premiere is like Jim Cartwright’s Two hopscotched with music. Or two Twos collided together. Six scenes or ‘playlets’ of each, unrelated scenarios with a multi-roling 13-strong cast.

Songs we’ll come to. Philip Ayckbourn’s full-length plays are well-loved here. They’re twisted with the uncanny. These six playlets are more realist, with a notable exception: zany, spanning centuries, the very best are spot-on. Some might do with trimming; this is a premiere though.

The empty space features in a programme note; it works perfectly. No set as such: chairs, a few props in the gift of cast, crew and Joanne Cull’s stage management, with ASM Eloise Chalmers.

Mea Culpa where Nick (Darren Heather) and Joanna (Emily Feist) row about who’s most to blame (each blame themselves!) inverts the usual heated squabble and reconciliation only happens when they accept each is right: and where do you skip to then? Heather’s excellent as hangdog Nick, Feist whom we sadly don’t see again nails Joanna in a delight of chiselled self-accusation.

Eleanor Lakin and Harry Heaven are revelatory as two singers in three songs from Ayckbourn shows. Memorable lyrics touch us. Anyone who’s been to musicals you’d find at Southwark or Jermyn Street, like Then, Now and Next, or Before/After (revived at Southwark on February 9^th), would recognise the idiom: and that Ayckbourn’s more than confident in such company.

When I’m Gone has Lakin’s Rose and Heaven’s Kyle delicately remembering each other in a pre-recorded piano accompaniment (a touch loud) before they’ve parted.

They return as the same characters in a two-losers-maybe-find-each-other set as party wallflowers. I Don’t Think That is For Me is a musicals standard: a counterpointed song by two people who don’t know the other’s there, oozing delicious self-deprecation (of a different order to Mea Culpa). Lakin dons specs too. This might be set earlier in the musical Ayckbourn’s written. Lakin’s soprano soars over circumstance; Heaven’s heavenly in his middle to upper tessitura. They inhabit hangdog.

Later, Lakin soloing as Stella in Every Step of the Way contemplates a smorgasbord of displacements. They’re a ravishing duet.

Sadly Lakin doesn’t re-appear in the second half but Heaven’s Kyle does, in Somebody to Talk To where Lucinda (Victoria Brewer, as present to Act 2 as Lakin was in the first, also as actor) determinedly seduces Kyle, breasting his space inch by conversational inch. Cringing for a while, Kyle gleefully accepts Lucinda’s outré vamp moves. Why wouldn’t he? It’s Brewer’s scene (Heaven’s Kyle is the falling-in guy here); she gleams with vocal heft and comedy.

Brewer too though shines in The Day We Said Goodbye, the final item. As Abby, with Jon Terry’s George, there’s the plangency of farewell, making an exit from love. Both are deeply affecting here, a diminuendo to the evening. Terry – who’s with Brewer in a quartet elsewhere – is touching and nuanced as Brewer.

One other singer – Stuart Simons in his single appearance as Vincent (Van Gogh) displays a low rainbow register of soft tones. Ayckbourn invokes in When I Come Home an elegy for little things you’d find in a still-life. He’s produced a small string-led score too: it’s masterly and plucks regret to perfection. The only problem is volume: Simons has to strain against it. It’s the only tech needing adjustment. Simons makes of a complex man a simplicity of longing.

Of playlets, Critical Analysis sets up a gleeful joke with most props: for chairs, a dustpan, a black bag and a Coke can with one chair empty. Adele (Carmen Dupre) and Tom (Logan Brewer) tease out meaning in these exhibits: Derrida, then a smorgasbord of philosophers, each with key-phrases: we’re more familiar with pretentious comments on philosophers than art-critics. Tony Bannister’s Frank turns up later. Great gag. Does it need to be more telegraphed, like “Rimsky? Of Korsakov”?

Madness in the Method is an extended gag (one of the two longest) with Bob Hamilton’s William and Gately Freeman’s Richard hammering out Will’s copious stage-directions. So a great Danish soliloquy is increasingly interrupted with taking three G&Ts. And the audience? William glowers with contempt. What can Richard do? Hamilton and Freeman purr in their ruffs.

Hamilton returns as Peter with Bannister’s Richard in Madness’ counterpart (also fifth – in Act Two) in Actors Reminisce. They’ve retired (memory and drink), but… recalling the increasingly outrageous acts of fellow-actors fire this pair up. It’s great fun, this pair are sovereign, including in confirming this lovingly-detailed, uproarious material (as with Madness) can fly in the right hands.

Act Two opens with The Waiter, a great set-piece. Brewer and Terry in their non-singing roles as Irene and Dennis drag Logan Brewer as a pewling child with a goggle-set-game strapped to his eyes. They’re a phone-obsessed non-communicating family barely noticing Freeman’s Franco. A waiter on a mission.

How he gets them to talk to each other is one of those coups showing a 12-minute playlet to perfection. Freeman works this memorably though Logan Brewer blossoms as the child finally unleashing his inner, well child in a winning speech that nails connection.

But finest of all is N.D.E. where Heather returning as divorced, sad Victor is visited by attractive Death (India Tindley). The skull face is so off-putting but pretty Death is sad, never appreciated, never has time off. Victor’s time is up according to Death’s phone.

But something happens. Twice. It’s exquisitely set up and acted by Heather and Tindley, a couple a tiny bit like those losers Rose and Kyle. A delight, it’s absolutely the right length (like Mea Culpa and The Waiter in particular).

Aside from N.D.E and the very best sketches, Ayckbourn’s songs are the heart of this collection. It’d be thrilling to see a full musical here; and staged in London. Enthusiastically recommended, there’s gems, with more of Ayckbourn’s elegiac sensibility than I’ve ever seen. More of this please.

Published February 3, 2024 by Simon Jenner