British playwright Alan Ayckbourn has long been the theater's champion daredevil, a man who never saw a stage stunt he wouldn't tackle. One of his early works, The Norman Conquests, was a cycle of three plays that recounted the events of a weekend from three different parts of the same house. One Ayckbourn play moves backward in time. Another conflates all the action in a house, from living room to attic, into a single stage space. His ingenious, nearly unstageable Intimate Exchanges has 16 permutations, depending on the choices made by characters at key points in the action.
So the gimmick of House and Garden, the two Ayckbourn plays currently being presented at London's Royal National Theatre, should come as little surprise. Set in the house and garden of an English country estate during one long afternoon, the plays are performed in two separate theaters by the same cast at the same time, the actors scurrying back and forth from one theater to the other. When a character chases offstage after his dog in House, he turns up a minute later in Garden; when a jilted woman enters with a limp and dark glasses in House, you find out only when you see Garden what mishap befell her.
It's an audacious, crazy, altogether brilliant achievement. Each play works on its own (although House is better than Garden), but each enhances the other. House revolves mainly around the shaky marriage between Teddy Platt (David Haig), the estate's owner, and his wife Trish (Jane Asher), who is giving him the silent treatment after discovering his affair with next-door neighbor Joanna (Sian Thomas). Teddy is desperate to patch things up before a prominent, politically connected writer arrives for lunch, presumably to urge him to run for Parliament. In Garden, we see Teddy ham-handedly break off his affair with Joanna, who goes steadily bonkers in the midst of preparations for the annual summer fete. Shuttling in and out of both plays are Teddy's precocious teenage daughter and her rather dim suitor; an alcoholic French actress on her way to the rehab clinic; a bizarre trio of household servants; another couple whose marriage is on the rocks; a children's maypole dance; and a driving rainstorm.
The laughs are plentiful, but the comedy, as usual in Ayckbourn, is tinged with pathos and pain. The bluff, insensitive Teddy barrels over the women in his life like a speeding London taxi. Giles (Michael Siberry), the sweetly clueless next-door neighbor, is the last to learn of his wife's affair and the first, pathetically, to forgive her. Ayckbourn has made a specialty of portraying people who are too dull-witted, or self-absorbed, or obsessed with social niceties, to comprehend the wreckage around them. The boozing French actress (Zabou Breitman), after a fling with Teddy, lets loose a torrential confession in a language he doesn't understand. "I don't think I've ever talked like this with anyone," he says, touched. Precisely.