Intimate Exchanges @ ACT
Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges plays at ACT Theatre through Sept. 14; tickets $10 (student) to $55.
Putting on a full production of Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges seems like a theatre company's attempt to dodge a bad review. With 16 possible endings (in the full script; ACT's production has a max of four), and two actors playing ten characters, with a reported total of 17 hours of dialogue in the script, well if you've only seen it once, you don't know the half of it, so how can you judge? Ein mal ist kein mal, right?
We may not be able to speak to the other three versions you can see at ACT during the run, but if last night's performance was any indication, despite the herculean efforts of a pair of talented actors, audiences are in for an uneven, inconsistent, schizoidal show that offers few rewards and feels primarily marketed towards PBS supporters who love Britcoms.
Veering wildly from an upstairs/downstairs comedy of manners, to farce and finally to slapstick, ACT's production concentrates on one of the two original couples: Celia Teasdale is the nervous, overly emotional wife of the boarding school headmaster, Toby, who's busy drinking himself into oblivion. Trapped in a loveless, collapsing marriage, Celia soon finds herself drawn to the charming and dimwitted school groundskeeper, Lionel Hepplewick. In true British fashion, much is made of class, and the actors, R. Hamilton Wright and Marianne Owen, do a fair to middling job with their accents: proper Toby over-enunciates his metaphor-heavy, verbose insults, while much fun is to be had at the expense of Lionel's down-market pronunciation. (A running gag is his claim that he's a "master baker," which always sounds like something else.)
R. Hamilton Wright as Miles and Marianne Owen as Celia in Intimate Exchanges at ACT – A Contemporary Theatre. Photo by Chris Bennion.
Act 1 dragged along, offering a few chuckles, but Act 2 started with a pop, and almost won us over to the play. The first scene introduced a pair of characters that allowed the actors to deliver some truly side-splitting comedy. Miles Coombes, the school board's chairman, is foppish dandy with a hard-on for Celia who bumbles about comically, districting Celia as she tries to cater a tea party. The stand out performance, though, was Irene Pridworthy, a classic English iron-woman, stiff upper lip, built like a tank and just about as subtle. The climax, in which Celia finally snaps, loses her mind, and has a tea party with the imaginary characters in her own head, is silly and over the top, but funny nonetheless. Then the play runs straight into a brick wall: the end, set five years later, is slow and understated and not nearly as funny.
Ultimately, all the gimmickry that goes into the play doesn't accomplish much. The actors have to run a marathon to keep the show going, which adds something, but what are you supposed to make of the uneven performances? Hamilton's brilliant as Miles, decent as Toby, and lacking as Lionel. As for the play's multiple endings and so on, it's an exercise in empty formalism at a meta level: if you weren't told upon going in that this was one of sixteen possible plays, you wouldn't know. All you would get is the rather disappointing feeling that you've sat through a really uneven play.
Or maybe we just saw it on the wrong night.
