by Alan Ayckbourn
the Duchess
Theatre, Chatsworth Centre, West Gate, Long Eaton
From Ayckbourn’s trilogy ‘Damsels in Distress', RolePlay is
a hilarious piece with dark undertones, a vintage ‘dinner-party from
hell’.
Ayckbourn is a master at handling people divided by class, accent,
habits and race. A young well-to-do couple, living in a posh docklands
apartment, have planned a civilised occasion when they hope to introduce
each other’s parents and also announce their engagement. The situation is tense enough before the arrival of two unexpected
guests, one a lap-dancing gangster’s moll, the other her burly
gun-toting minder. What her parents (the bigoted northern stereotype and his
dim twittering wife) and his mother (toy-boy chasing and
drink-soaked) find when they arrive shows us that the bourgeois guests,
under their respective veneers, are far more frightening than the
interlopers.
Each of Ayckbourn’s characters is playing a role to escape reality
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