Things that go bumb

Anticipating our wedding anniversary a week tomorrow we are off to the theatre today.


Life And Beth: Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough


Life And Beth is Alan Ayckbourn's latest play and receiving its world premiere this summer at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough.


Director: Alan Ayckbourn
Design: Pip Leckenby
Lighting: Kath Geraghty
Cast:
Beth (Liza Goddard)
Gordon (Adrian McLoughlin)
Martin (Richard Stacey)
Ella (Ruth Gibson)
Connie (Susie Blake)
David (Ian Hogg)


Venue & Booking Details
Venue: Stephen Joseph Theatre, ScarboroughDates: In repertory, 17 July - 30 August, 2008Performance Times: Monday to Saturday at 7.30pm; Saturday at 2.30pm
Bump Weekends (Haunting Julia, Snake In The Grass & Life And Beth): 25-26 July, 1-2, 8-9, 15-16 & 22-23 August. (performance times: Friday @ 7.30pm; Saturday @ 2.30pm and 7.30pm). Ticket Prices: £9 - £18.50Ticket Offer: Bump Weekend Ticket (all the Bump plays) £36Box office: 01723 370541
Website: www.sjt.uk.com / www.thingsthatgobump.co.uk

Life and Beth at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough
Sam Marlowe (Times Review)

Christmas has come early to Scarborough in Alan Ayckbourn's new yuletide comedy — the writer's 71st play. Along with a couple of revivals of earlier Ayckbourn works, it forms the Stephen Joseph Theatre's spookily themed Things That Go Bump season. Sadly, though, there is little here to quicken the pulse. Life & Beth is as cosily predictable, and as dated in feel, as a Seventies sitcom. If there is pleasure to be had here, it resides primarily in the comic brio of the cast, and in the odd instance of sharp repartee.

Beth (played by Liza Goddard) was recently bereaved when her overbearing husband, Gordon, a pettifogging health and safety officer, fell from a ladder at work. Facing her first Christmas as a widow, she must also contend with her nerdish, patronising son Martin, his mute, cowed girlfriend Ella, and Gordon's depressive sister Connie (a bitterly funny Susie Blake).

Connie is a particular worry; her taste for red wine has led her, on a previous festive occasion, to attempt to ride the illuminated flashing reindeer that Gordon always insisted on erecting outside the house.

Beth's main source of comfort - the cat, with which Gordon shared a mutual antipathy — has mysteriously gone missing, and a visit from the oleaginous vicar amorously pressing unwelcome spiritual succour upon her is far from welcome.

Just as it seems that things cannot get any worse, the lights fuse — and there, at the head of the table like the apparition of slaughtered Banquo or some nylon-besuited Spirit of Christmas Present, is Gordon's grinning ghost.

There's a dash of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit to the play, with Beth much put out by her phantom husband's arrival and the vicar acting as a kind of clerical Madame Arcati. The suggestion, in Gordon's account of life after death, that Heaven is like a celestial version of the Civil Service might raise a smile. But even the characters this side of the grave suffer a wraith-like lack of substance, so thinly drawn are they.

Nor do the relationships convince. Ayckbourn implies the tedium and unhappiness of Beth and Gordon's marriage, but offers no explanation about why the perfectly capable and confident-seeming Beth should have tolerated it for so long. Equally, what keeps Martin, clearly following in his father's clod-hoppingly insensitive footsteps, and the miserable Ella together remains a mystery.

Some nifty business with wires and trapdoors lends Ayckbourn's staging the occasional faint frisson of the supernatural, yet the production overall is bedevilled by a serious lack of pace. The actors still succeed in making the best of the lines sting, with Blake's increasingly woozy and rancorous Connie especially diverting. But this is pretty tame entertainment.

Life and Beth
Stephen Joseph, Scarborough


Michael Billington
The Guardian

Alan Ayckbourn's 71st play is full of ghosts: not just spooks, but haunting echoes of themes that have animated his work over 40 years. Presented as part of a supernatural trio in Ayckbourn's last season as director, it feels both like a summing-up and a wise, humane, funny play about the inevitability of death and the continuity of life.

Life and Beth
Stephen Joseph,
Scarborough
YO11 1JW
Until August 30

After 33 years of marriage, Beth has come to terms with the demise of her husband, Gordon. But, in the course of a horrendous family Christmas, she seems the only one who has. Her sister-in-law uses his memory as an excuse to drown in boozy self-pity, while Beth's son camouflages his grief under a bombastic heartiness that reduces his girlfriend to tearful catatonia. But, just as Beth looks ready to embrace a new life, she finds herself subject to a spine-tingling visitation.

What makes the play both comic and touching is Ayckbourn's indignant sympathy for oppressed women. You realise that Beth was cowed by the appalling Gordon, and when his son says "most of the women I've been out with start crying sooner or later", you get an instant image of a grisly inheritance. Few dramatists in history have painted a more devastating picture of the emotional damage wrought by bullying men. Liza Goddard's stoic Beth, however, shows that they can triumph, and there is priceless support from Susie Blake as her sister-in-law and Ian Hogg as a beaming cleric who croons that you should "accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative", which, in the end, is roughly the message of Ayckbourn's life-affirming ghost story