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REVIEW: Living On Fresh Air, “A breath-taking comedy” by John Godber ****

On their knees: Jane Thornton’s Caroline and John Godber’s Dave in Living On Fresh Air

John Godber Company in Living On Fresh Air, striding out at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, tonight until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 1.30pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com

JOHN Godber likes to put the physical in his plays, from men’s Rugby League to ladies’ rugby sevens, judo to weightlifting, skiing to crown bowls, cycling to hill walking… or the sheer physicality of the clashing doormen in Bouncers. Action theatre as the academics call it.

Walking, in pursuit of exercise under Covid restrictions, grew in popularity beyond Alfred Wainwright devotees. On one such pandemic perambulation, your reviewer bumped into – well, kept a responsible social distance from – John Godber and wife Jane Thornton on the waterside of Pocklington Canal.

“Must be plenty of material for a play about Covid-19, John?”. “No comedy there,” ruled out Godber. So, maybe not Covid (although it does feature prominently in his revamp of Teechers Leavers ’22) but walking now lies at the heart of Living On Fresh Air, as John and Jane take to the stage together again, just as they did in recent years in Shafted, Scary Bikers and Sunny Side Up.

Presented by the John Godber Company in association with Harrogate Theatre, Godber’s state-of-the-nation report and all’s-not-well Orwellian look into the future already has had a run-out in the reviving spa town after a preview week at Beverley’s East Riding Theatre in late-March.

Now Living On Fresh Air is going for a bracing stretch on the coast, camping out in the Round from tonight at the SJT. It opens with Godber and Thornton’s newly retired Yorkshire couple Dave and Caroline out of puff as they reach the peak of Scafell Pike.

It will be all down hill from there, for Britain, for Dave and Caroline’s retirement plans, but not for the play, a grouchily humorous outpouring of present frustrations, doom-and-gloom whither-next forecasts and forlorn, probably futile forewarnings amid Godber’s despair at how we have gone from the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK to apathy at the decay.

In a typically conversational Godber play of direct address to the audience and chatter between the affable, head-shaking couple, full of anecdotal snapshots, we learn that Dave and Caroline had everything they ever wanted: nice house, hot tub, small mortgage, a few savings and a new smart meter.

However, the plug is pulled from the hot tub (er, do hot tubs have plugs?) by the double whammy of Covid and its equally unwelcome new next-door neighbour, the cost-of-living crisis.

Their middle-aged son (Peter McMillan) moves back home, bills are rising faster than Boris Johnson’s fat cheques on the speaker circuit, and so is the temperature (that other crisis of the climate variety). Peace and quiet, going, money, going, tub gone.

Better take to the hills, they decide, to live on fresh air, wrapped up against the elements, in the Dales and the Lakes and on Scafell Pike alike on Graham Kirk’s set, but even that has a sting in the tale once Godber projects into the not-too-distant future. (Just as Alan Ayckbourn is doing likewise, by the way, in his two imminent premieres, Welcome To The Family, at The Old Laundry, Bowness-on-Windermere, from May 12 to 27, and Constant Companions at his regular stamping ground of the SJT from September 7 to October 7).

Ten years from now, as his by-now septuagenarian couple reveals, Godber predicts people will be living in containers in London; the arts will have been suppressed; health care privatised; fat cats will be even fatter; utilities bills ever higher, and roaming charges will apply, not to using mobile phones abroad, but to walking in beautiful public spaces.

Is this a joke? A tragicomedy, more like. Or a farce too serious to be funny, although there is observant, blunt but sharp Yorkshire humour aplenty here too.

Does a playwright need to offer hope? No? Does he have a duty to offer answers? No. McCartney once sang “I admit it’s getting better, a little better all the time”, only for Lennon to counter acidly “It can’t get no worse”, but now Godber believes it can and it will. No sign of a tide turning, or even a voice turning against the tide; no raging against the dying of the light; no wise Shakespearean Fool on the hill. Only Cassandra.

Co-directed briskly by Godber and Neil Sissons, you can’t call it a cautionary tale because Godber foresees no-one breaking the shackles of apathy. What lies in store? Struggles to pull on your socks as you age is just the start. Tough as old boots they may be, but weary walkers Dave and Caroline have too many mountains to climb, and so do we all.

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Angie Millard’s York theatre collective make debut with still shocking Sixties’ Orton farce

York Actors Collective director Angie Millard, left, and stage manager Em Peattie

YORK Actors Collective, the like-minded group set up by theatre director, critic and theatre and film studies tutor Angie Millard, will make their debut with Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane next month.

Premiered in the West End in 1964, Orton’s controversial farce still has the power to shock almost 50 years later with its story of Kath bringing home a lodger: the amoral and psychopathic Mr Sloane.

Her father recognises him from his past life and challenges Mr Sloane’s honesty, but when her brother Ed arrives, everything turns more complicated. A tense sexual struggle for Mr Sloane ensues as he plays one sibling off against the other while their father is caught in the crossfire.

The roles at Theatre@41, Monkgate, from March 15 to 18 go to Victoria Delaney as Kath, York St John University student Ben Weir as Mr Sloane, Chris Pomfrett as Ed and Mick Liversidge as the father, Dada Kemp.

“Victoria and Chris have been involved with the new group since last summer,” says Angie. “We talked about so many plays, plays that would have audience appeal but also be challenging for the performers.

A troublesome triangle: Ben Weir’s Mr Sloane, left, with Victoria Delaney’s Kath and Chris Pomfrett’s Ed in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane. Picture: John Saunders

“Entertaining Mr Sloane was one. Joe Orton died too young [aged 34 on August 9 1967], so there aren’t that many plays and they’re not performed that often. I think people are a bit frightened of him, but the thing I love about him is the way he takes a theatrical form and updates it totally to his time, the Sixties. The language is brilliant; the writing is so funny.”

Angie continues: “The other big thing about Orton is that he was writing at a time of censorship, and the innuendo in the play is there to help him get away with things – and he did! He got away with murder! Especially when the censors were looking for homosexuality without recognising it.”

Controversy still surrounds Orton. “I find his treatment of women difficult in his plays, like his treatment of Kath. He makes her grotesque, and finally when she gets her revenge, in a way he had to do that for the shape of the play,” says Angie.

“Left to his own devices, he wouldn’t have done it, but he was such a master of theatrical form, though not of detail. It means I have to work very hard to work out how to get props on and off because he’s forgotten about them.”

Orton’s savagely sharp, confrontational dramas present challenges to director and cast alike. “I like to look at a play and see what you can do with it, and then you make your decisions about it. Orton’s estate are keen that you don’t change words, but rather than Kath having to be naked [as denoted in the play], Victoria is making her look seductive, clothed,” says Angie.

Ed-lock: Chris Pomfrett’s Ed and Mick Liversidge’s Dada Kemp in York Actors Collective’s debut production of Entertaining Mr Sloane. Picture: John Saunders

“We’re playing it in the period setting – the 1960s – and there are things like racist references in there, but because Kath takes a non-racist attitude, it works.

“There are lots of times where her brother Ed treats her shabbily too – they have a very unhappy, complex relationship – and you realise he could easily be transported to 2023 and still behave like that in the home.”

Looking back to the Sixties and the prevailing attitudes towards women at the time, Angie says: “I was a young student in London, at college doing drama and then going to university after that, and men treated you in a certain way; they all did, but that was the culture of the time. When I hear women complain now, I understand, but I also think, ‘you should have been there in the Sixties; that behaviour was the norm’.”

From Sheffield originally, Angie and her husband Clive moved to York ten years ago, since when she has played her part in the arts world, whether directing Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman In Mind for York Settlement Community Players or writing reviews for York Calling. 

Now, she has formed her own troupe. “I don’t know if any other group would have put on this play, saying ‘it’s too shocking. No-one will come’. But York deserves to be shocked! If you fall shy of that, then you don’t see the theatre you deserve,” she says.

“I find his treatment of women difficult in his plays,” says director Angie Millard of Joe Orton. Here Ben Weir’s Mr Sloane attacks Victoria Delaney’s Kath. Picture: John Saunders

“I’m putting my own money into this project. People have hobbies that they put their money into, and I’m equating what I’m doing with that. I’d like to break even, and if people come along, we shall continue and do another play.”

Should you be wondering why the York Actors Collective is so called, Angie says: “I wanted to call it a ‘cooperative’ but everyone else wanted ‘collective’, and I thought ‘fair enough’! But whatever the name, it’s a passion project that I really wanted to do, where like-minded actors aim to produce entertaining and thought-provoking theatre.

“I don’t think Entertaining Mr Sloane is Orton’s best play. That would be What The Butler Saw, but by not doing this play you would be losing out on what is superb about it: it’s an actor’s play, a character play, where you really get into those characters’ situations.”

And so, the York Actors Collective is born.

York Actors Collective in Entertaining Mr Sloane, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, March 15 to 18, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

Did you know?

ENTERTAINING Mr Sloane lead actress Victoria Delaney also will be appearing in York Settlement Community Players’ production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing at York Theatre Royal Studio from April 5 to 15. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

Copyright of The Press, York

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Alan Ayckbourn plays with time and space, history and the present, in Family Album

Alan Ayckbourn directing rehearsals for Family Album, his 87th full-length play. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

NO sooner has the world premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s 86th full-length play All Lies concluded at the tiny, moorland Esk Valley Theatre than his 87th opens at his regular home, Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre.

Family Album is one of five plays penned by Ayckbourn in lockdown, or is it six, as Esk Valley Theatre producer Sheila Carter suggested on press night?

“Oh lord, I’ve rather lost count, but there are two more waiting after All Lies and Family Album,” says Sir Alan, whose number of plays now outstrips his age of 83.

“Once lockdown occurred, I was like one of those ocean liners that chugged on with no brakes until running out of fuel, but there was all that frustration of no productions going on.”

What joy for Sir Alan when he could at last return to the rehearsal room in May last year for the SJT’s summer production of The Girl Next Door. “Doing that play gave me a huge charge of the batteries,” he says.

This year, already he has directed All Lies in its premiere at The Old Laundry Theatre, Bowness, in May and the Robinson Institute, Glaisdale, last month. Now he is pulling the strings on Family Album as writer, director and sound designer, directing Elizabeth Boag, Georgia Burnell, Tanya-Loretta Dee, Antony Eden and York-born Frances Marshall as he tenderly chronicles the trials, tribulations and temptations of three generations of one family across 70 years in the same home.

Presented, as ever, in The Round, Ayckbourn interweaves his account of a moving-in day in 1952, a birthday party in 1992 and a moving-out day in 2022, “when all the skeletons are suddenly jumping out of their cupboards”.

York actress Frances Marshall in an early rehearsal for the 1992 storyline in Family Album. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

Join housewife Peggy (Burnell) and RAF veteran John (Eden) as they proudly move into the first home they can really call their own; daughter Sandra (Marshall), frantically negotiating the challenges of her ten-year-old daughter’s birthday party without her AWOL husband; and granddaughter Alison (Boag) and her partner Jess (Dee), finally escaping the house she has somewhat unwillingly inherited.

 “My inspiration was a programme on BBC4 called A House Through Time, a fascinating piece of social history [presented by historian David Olusoga]. I thought, I could do this on a smaller scale – I didn’t want to go back centuries, so I started within my lifetime, in the 1950s.

“We have three time periods layered on top of each other happening simultaneously in the same house, following a family from the grandparents in 1952, to the children in 1992 and then the grandchildren today.”

Ayckbourn is no stranger to playing with time, but not in this way before. “For me it’s new: I’ve used time so much – I’ve run it backwards and forwards, and I’ve run it sideways, and I’ve occasionally run it forwards and backwards simultaneously and at different speeds, but never in this way,” he says.

Parallels have been drawn with Ayckbourn’s 2018 premiere, A Brief History Of Women, a comedy in four parts, each set 20 years apart, focusing on an unremarkable man and the remarkable women who loved him, left him, or lost him over sixty years, and the equally remarkable old manor house that saw and heard it all happen.

“That play was the story of the house seen through the eyes of the people who ‘mucked about with it’, as it changed from a country house to a country-house hotel,” says Sir Alan. “This time, it’s the people, seen through the house. 

“I’ve realised with age, when you have a choice, you can either look back, and I can look back to the wartime 1940s, with my first conscious memory of an air raid shelter, right up to 2022, which is one choice, or you can look forward, the other choice.

Antony Eden rehearsing his role as RAF veteran John in Family Album. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

“It’s no coincidence that our most successful children’s writers, Morpurgo and Rowling, have looked at science fiction in order to reach a generation they’re not able to reach otherwise – and the best science fiction reflects what’s happening now.

“I can write plays for my near-contemporaries, but my plays for young people also give me the chance to make up my own rules, which can apply to both me and the children I’m writing for.”

Family Album reflects on the past and its impact on the next generation, especially on women. “One of the themes is the enormous journey women have been on. My God, they have moved a long way, and the most interesting thing for me to do was to write a play set in 1952, 1992 and 2022, that would be much more interesting if I interweaved all three.

“It’s my latest exploration of the theatre space offered by The Round, which goes back to How The Other Half Loves [written in 1969], with everyone in the play occupying one space.”

Ayckbourn says a “stinging contemporary play” is not in his armoury at present – the romantic All Lies, for example, was set in 1957-58 – and he does not foresee writing “directly” about our rotten age. Instead he will continue looking at changing times. 

“I do explore the changes in men in future plays,” he says. “I’m very curious to see quite where men will go. Many men have changed; for every dyed-in-the-wool chauvinist, there is a new man.”

Alan Ayckbourn’s Family Album runs at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until October 1. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.

Georgia Burnell, who plays housewife Peggy, rehearses a scene from the 1952 storyline in Family Album. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
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More Things To Do in York and beyond when questions needs answering. Such as? Find out in List No. 96, from The Press

Barrel of laughs: Al Murray, the Pub Landlord, has the answer, whatever the question

FOOD and food for thought, pub concert and Pub Landlord, outsider comedy and  family drama whet Charles Hutchinson’s appetite.

Comedy gig of the week in York: Al Murray: The Pub Landlord, Gig For Victory, Grand Opera House, York, Thursday, 7.30pm

“AS the dust settles and we emerge blinking into the dawn of a new year, the men and women of this great country will need answers,” reckons the Guvnor, Al Murray. “Answers that they know they need, answers to questions they never knew existed.”

When that moment comes, who better to show the way, to provide those answers, than the people’s man of the people, Murray, The Pub Landlord? Cue his pugnacious bar-room wisdom in the refurbished Grand Opera House. Box office: 0844 871 7615 or atgtickets.com/York.

Miles and The Chain Gang: New territory tonight

Pub gig of the week: Miles and The Chain Gang, The New Smithy Arms, Malton Road, Swinton, near Malton, tonight (27/8/2022), 9pm

YORK band Miles and The Chain Gang are heading to the New Smithy Arms gastro pub this weekend.

“It’s our first time performing in the Malton area,” says songwriter and singer Miles Salter. “We’ll be playing a selection of our own songs, plus some old classics from Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and The Rolling Stones.”

Latest single Love Is Blind has been aired 400 times on radio stations around the world, YouTube views of the band have topped 50,000 and their 2022 gig diary has taken in Doncaster, Harrogate and Helmsley.

Three-day event: Malton Summer Food Lovers Festival

Festival of the week: Malton Summer Food Lovers Festival, today (27/8/2022) and tomorrow from 9am, Bank Holiday Monday, from 10am.

THIS is the second Malton Food Lovers Festival of 2022, taking over the streets of “Yorkshire’s food capital” for three days in a celebration of fine produce and cooking.

Expect artisan stalls, street food, talks, tastings, celebrity chefs, cookery and blacksmith demonstrations, a festival bar, buskers, brass bands and Be Amazing Arts in the Creativitent.

Look out for Tommy Banks, from The Black Swan, Oldstead, and Roots, York, on the festival demo stage today at 1pm. Festival entry is free.

Daniel Kitson: Wanting a word with you Outside

Comedy gigs of the week outside York: Daniel Kitson: Outside, At The Mill, Stillington Mill, near York, Monday (29/8/2022) to Wednesday, 7.30pm

DENBY Dale stand-up comedian Daniel Kitson had not been on stage for two years when he contacted At The Mill promoter Alexander Flanagan Wright to say “hello, could I come and do a show?”.

Not one show, but six work-in-progress gigs, performed in two sold-out blocks from May 23 to 25 and June 8 to 10. He enjoyed the Mill outdoor experience so much, he has added a third run for August’s dying embers.

Tickets have flown again for the latest chance to watch Kitson “find out whether he can still do his job and what, if anything, he has to say to large groups of people he doesn’t know”. For returns only, contact atthemill.org.

That’ll be Mel Day: Guest star for The Story Of Soul. Picture: Entertainers

History show of the week: The Story Of Soul, Grand Opera House, York, Wednesday, 7.30pm

FROM the producers of Lost In Music and The Magic Of Motown comes The Story Of Soul with special guest Mel Day, “The Soul Man” from Britain’s Got Talent.

This journey through the history of sweet soul music takes in the songs of Aretha Franklin, Earth Wind And Fire, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Chaka Khan, Tina Turner, The Pointer Sisters, Luther Vandross, Whitney Houston, Ben E King, Barry White and plenty more. Box office: 0844 871 7615 or atgtickets.com/York.

Foy Vance: Showing Signs Of Life at York Barbican

Blues gig of the week: Foy Vance, Signs Of Life Tour, York Barbican, Wednesday, 7.50pm

NORTHERN Irish singer-songwriter Foy Vance plays York Barbican in support of his fourth studio album, Signs Of Life, in a gig rearranged from March 25.

The redemptive record finds Bangor-born Vance – husband, father, hipster, sinner, drinker – belatedly coming to terms with his demons in his late-40s.

The storytelling bluesman, survivor, rocker and folk hero calls Signs Of Life “an album of dawn after darkness, hope after despair, engagement after isolation, uplift after lockdown”. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.

One for the Family Album: Writer-director Alan Ayckbourn, left, Jude Deeno and David Lomond in rehearsal for his 87th play, premiering at the SJT. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

Play launch of the week: Alan Ayckbourn’s Family Album, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, Friday to October 1

FAMILY Album, his 87th full-length play, is written, directed and sound designed by Alan Ayckbourn for its world premiere in The Round at the SJT.

Ayckbourn tenderly chronicles the trials, tribulations and temptations of three generations of one family across 70 years in the same home. 

Join RAF veteran John and housewife Peggy as they proudly move into the first home they can really call their own in 1952; daughter Sandra, frantically negotiating the challenges of a ten-year-old’s birthday party without her AWOL husband in 1992, and granddaughter Alison, finally escaping the house she has somewhat unwillingly inherited in 2022. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.

The poster for In The Name Of Love, The Diana Ross Story tribute show

Tribute show of the week: In The Name Of Love, The Diana Ross Story, York Barbican, September 3, 7.30pm

IN the wake of Diana Ross headlining the Platinum Party At The Palace at 78 and playing Leeds First Direct Arena in June with a 14-piece band, here comes the tribute show.

In a chronological set list, Cheri Jade takes on The Supremes’ catalogue before Tameka Jackson handles the solo Diana years.

Here come Where Did Our Love Go, Baby Love, Stop In The Name Of Love, Reflections, You Keep Me Hanging On, You Can’t Hurry Love, Stoned Love, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, Touch Me In The Morning, Upside Down, My Old Piano, I’m Coming Out and Chain Reaction. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.

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REVIEW: Alan Ayckbourn’s All Lies, Esk Valley Theatre, Robinson Institute, Glaisdale, near Whitby, until August 27

Luke Dayhill’s Sebastian Goodfellow and Saskia Strallen’s Posy Capstick in All Lies. Picture: Steven Barber

ALAN Ayckbourn wrote five plays in the lockdown lull for live theatre, says Esk Valley Theatre director Mark Stratton. Or six, according to Sheila Carter, when CharlesHutchPress chatted with the producer pre-show.

Is it five? Or is it six? What’s the truth? Well, All Lies is definitely Scarborough knight Sir Alan’s 86th full-length play, soon to be followed by his 87th, Family Album, opening at the Stephen Joseph Theatre on September 2.

His 84th, Anno Domino, took the form of an audio play performed by Ayckbourn and his wife, Heather Stoney, in an online fundraiser for the SJT during the first 2020 lockdown, and later that year he played three principal roles in an online audio reinvention of Haunting Julia.

Why mention this? Because All Lies equally would have suited being presented as a radio play, given its somewhat static style of performance, where the focus falls on the to and fro of letters until the finale when the play’s young lovers are seen sitting together for the first time, albeit at opposite ends of a coffee-bar table.

For so long a supporter of Esk Valley Theatre’s small-scale but highly professional summer productions in a village hall on the North York Moors, writer-director Ayckbourn offered All Lies to Stratton and Carter to complement the initial May run at The Old Laundry Theatre, Bowness, with Stratton taking on the assistant director’s role for the EVT run.

In tight, Covid-shadowed financial times, it fitted the bill with its cast of three and shared costs, and not least the kudos of staging an Ayckbourn world premiere. As ever, EVT devotees have been turning up by the busload, on this occasion for an enjoyable triangular drama, but not one with Ayckbourn’s usual visual flair.

Alan Ayckbourn: Prolific play-writing in lockdown. Picture: Tony Bartholomew, May 2020

Roger Glossop’s set design amounts to three chairs, each facing the audience, two to the side at the front, the other central and raised, at the back. They look socially distanced, but that feeling may just be a hangover from Covid restrictions.

Here, the magical flourishes and application of the imagination must come from Luke Dayhill’s Sebastian Goodfellow and Saskia Strallen’s Posy Capstick, who both gild the lily when trying to present the best of themselves to each other. Or tell little white lies, if you you want to be brutally honest.

In Ayckbourn’s sparse presentation, they are not shown doing this directly to each other, but in letters that they read out as they write them: Posy to a friend; Sebastian to his frank, eventually exasperated family-outcast sister Sonia (Rhiannon Neads, occupier of the central third seat), who in turn shares her thoughts with sceptical, scathing gay lover Bobbie and then responds to Sebastian.

Letters, you say? Yes, the setting is 1957-1958, when people still took to pen and paper. It puts the emphasis on the verbal on stage, with Ayckbourn letting the audience enjoy being one step ahead of the two young lovers, later joined by the letters’ recipients being likewise.

Ayckbourn is writing in the age of fake news, Trumipian alternative truths, Johnsonian obfuscation, social-media misinformation, government disinformation. “The sad thing is there’s a lot of lying going on these days,” he says in his programme notes.

Ayckbourn has always been about truths, home truths, especially about the domestic lie of the land. Hence, rather than “the massive lies (allegedly) told every day by presidents and prime ministers”, he focuses on “those harmless, rather pathetic little everyday lies we tell, usually about ourselves, to improve our image”.

To and fro of letters: Luke Dayhill’s Sebastian Goodfellow, Saskia Strallen’s Posy Capstick, right, and Rhiannon Neads’s Sonia in All Lies. Picture: Steven Barber

Today, that “slight make-over” would involve photoshopping pictures on social media or falsehoods on (Love Me) Tinder. In 1957, the “unattainable handsome boy”, Sebastian Goodfellow, and “the unreachable beautiful girl”, Posy Capstick, do it brazenly face to face, although we see it only in reportage, in those letters, before the curtain falls on chair number three.

The effect is somewhat distancing, keeping the characters at one step removed until the wit, wisdom and warmth of Ayckbourn’s ever-astute writing permeates the rigid surface, as he weighs up the pros and cons of lies, whether they can ever be innocent or are destined to haunt you.

This is not one of his darker pieces, nor one of his more substantial works, but a sage one with a note of forgiveness and understanding, one with a smile on its face, a lightness of step, as lie trumps lie, after Posy’s Last Night of the Proms outing turns into a first night of a new romance with trouser salesman Sebastian, who claims to be a cellist with the Halle Orchestra and later a spy. He bluffs, she bluffs, and the lies become ever more elaborate, but ultimately these love birds are naughty but nice.

“The truth is out there somewhere,” says Ayckbourn, but is the truth in there too in All Lies?In this instance, love is more powerful than all the nervous, desperate-to-please fantasies the lovers spin. Does that ring true? You decide, but how lovely to see the old romantic at work in Sir Alan, helped enormously by his making jack-the-lad, reticent Sebastian and the more assured, clipped Posy such young charmers for Dayhill and Strallen to embellish with relish. Neads adds amusement aplenty with Sonia’s rising bemusement.

Black-and-white kitchen-sink dramas of the late-Fifties and early Sixties would tell a different truth, a darker one, not least through Billy Liar’s Billy Fisher. He was the schemer; Sebastian and Posy are a midsummer night’s dreamers.

Box office: 01947 897587 or eskvalleytheatre.co.uk.

Review by Charles Hutchinson

The plotting thickens: Saskia Strallen’s lady of letters in All Lies. Picture: Steven Barber
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How come an Alan Ayckbourn world premiere is being staged in a moorland village institute? The truth on All Lies

Will the truth hurt in Alan Ayckbourn’s All Lies when Luke Dayhill’s Sebastian and Saskia Strallen’s Posy fall in love? Picture: Steven Barber

ESK Valley Theatre is presenting the world premiere production of Alan Ayckbourn’s 86th full-length play in a North Yorkshire moorland village.

All Lies is running at the Robinson Institute, Glaisdale, six miles from Whitby, until August 27, directed by Ayckbourn himself. And yes, that is the truth.

“We were approached by Alan,” says a delighted Mark Stratton, Esk Valley Theatre’s artistic director, who is Ayckbourn’s assistant director for the three-hander, written in the quietude of the pandemic lockdowns.

“All Lies was already booked for two weeks at the Old Laundry Theatre, in Bowness-on-Windermere, in May, but the feeling was that was too short a run for an Ayckbourn premiere.

“Alan has been a big supporter of our work for years and has seen many of our plays, so he said, ‘would you like to take it?’. We thought, ‘well, why don’t we put it on in our regular August slot as the institute is busy for other parts of the year?’.

“The way we’ve done it, the actors signed contracts for Bowness and then contracts for us, with Alan holding two days of rehearsals in Scarborough to help to prepare for the re-start in Glaisdale.”

Initial rehearsals had been conducted at Alan’s Scarborough studio for two weeks from April 19, “before the whole shebang moved over to Bowness” for its debut. “We’re billing our run as the ‘world premiere production’ because it’s the same production,” says Mark.

“Alan’s involvement has been right the way through until he handed over to me in order to start rehearsals for his next play at the Stephen Joseph Theatre [Scarborough], Family Album.

“My role has been minimal, as ‘caretaker’ director, while keeping the production’s Ayckbourn integrity. We’ve been wanting Esk Valley Theatre to be involved as a producer on an Ayckbourn play, without treading on the SJT’s toes, and this has been our opportunity.”

All Lies is set in 1957-1958, when a chance meeting elicits love at first sight! The person of your dreams! But will they feel the same? Once you tell the truth about yourself, will you even be worthy of them? Do you take the plunge and reveal all? Or choose the dangerous alternative and tell them…All Lies?!

Luke Dayhill as Sebastian Goodfellow, Rhiannon Neads as sister Sonia Goodfellow, back, and Saskia Strallen as Posy Capstick in All Lies. Picture: Steven Barber

Questions, questions, so many Ayckbourn questions, in a play of subtle wit and shifting sands where the truth is in there somewhere when a young couple falls in love but the little lies develop into something much bigger.

Can Mark reveal a little more? “Well, the clues are in the title! It’s one of those plays where one thing leads to another, so you don’t want to give too much away, but yes, lies are told, and where do lies lead when you spin a web of deceit?!” he says.

“It’s very much a play about two people wanting to show their best side to each other when they first meet, but what happens when someone exaggerates who they are? What happens down the line?

“It becomes that catalogue of things that happen when lies are told, but it’s also about the fragility of egos and how we want to be seen in the best light when we don’t have the confidence just to be ourselves.”

What is the significance of the Fifties’ setting? “It was the age of letter writing, pre-mobile technology, when people wrote letters to express themselves deeply in a way they don’t show themselves so emotionally now,” says Mark.

“Alan is so good at picking at things, exposing them, and while it’s set in 1957, it reflects on how we’ve changed as a society.”

All Lies is not in Ayckbourn’s darkest vein by any means, suggests Mark. “There are just a few dark undertones. It’s a light and frothy piece in many ways,” he says. “It’s more…it’s not Noel Coward but it has a lovely light comedy quality about it with beautiful wordplay.”

At 83, Ayckbourn is as prolific as ever, so much so that he has a backlog of new work accruing from theatres going into hibernation in lockdown. “Alan’s brain is so brilliant,” says Mark. “You can’t but marvel at him. Most writers would be happy with five plays in a lifetime, but Alan has written five in a matter of months!”

Esk Valley Theatre presents Alan Ayckbourn’s All Lies at Robinson Institute, Glaisdale, near Whitby, until August 27 with a cast of Luke Dayhill, Rhiannon Neads and Saskia Strallen. Box office: 01947 897587.

Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, presents Alan Ayckbourn’s Family Album from September 2 to October 1. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.

Say cello, wave goodbye? Will love crumble when the truth is out for Sebastian and Posy in Alan Ayckbourn’s All Lies at Esk Valley Theatre?

Copyright of The Press, York

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More Things To Do in and around York on walls, in parks, by water, on stage and in future. List No. 94, courtesy of The Press

The Cure’s Robert Smith backstage, by Alison O’Neill, from her debut exhibition of 1980s’ music photos at City Screen, York. Copyright: Alison O’Neill

FROM The Cure’s Eighties’ photos to Ayckbourn’s lies, folk, riverside and walls festivals to folk’s future, Charles Hutchinson picks his highlights of the week ahead and beyond.

Exhibition launch of the week: Trapped In The Light, 1980s Music Photos by Alison O’Neill, Sky Lounge, City Screen Picturehouse, York, Sunday to September 10

ALISON O’Neill loved photographing The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Jesus & Mary Chain and The Cramps in the 1980s, but those black-and-white concert and backstage images have been in hibernation for more than three decades, never exhibited until now.

Why? “Shyness,” she says, but with the encouragement of a photographer friend in Berlin, she is letting those nocturnal photographic encounters see the light of day at last at City Screen.

Play of the week: Alan Ayckbourn’s All Lies, Esk Valley Theatre, Robinson Institute, Glaisdale, near Whitby, until August 27

When the little white lies start: Luke Dayhill and Saskia Strallen as the young couple in Alan Ayckbourn’s All Lies at Esk Valley Theatre. Picture: Steven Barber

FOLLOWING its initial run at the Old Laundry Theatre, Bowness-on-Windermere, in May, Esk Valley Theatre presents the world premiere production of writer-director Alan Ayckbourn’s 86th full-length play.

The setting is 1957/1958, when a  when a chance meeting elicits love at first sight! The person of your dreams! But will they feel the same? Once you tell the truth about yourself, will you even be worthy of them? Do you take the plunge and reveal all? Or choose the dangerous alternative and tell them…All Lies?!

Questions, questions, so many Ayckbourn questions, in a play where it may be all lies but the truth is in there somewhere. Box office: 01947 897587.

Inside a tipi at the Boatyard York Festival

New festival of the week: The Boatyard York Summer Festival, Ferry Lane, Bishopthorpe, York, today, 11am to 7pm

THE Boatyard plays host to its first summer riverside festival this weekend, featuring live music from York bands and musicians, such as Up In Smoke, and an array of street food to suit meat eaters and vegetarians alike.

Organised by Eva Brindley, this family-orientated day promises a Punch & Judy show, face-painting, fare stalls and games, ping pong and volleyball, plus canoe, kayak and day boat hire. Look out for the Bosun’s Oven café, wood-fired pizzas and summery drinks from the horsebox bar. Dogs are welcome; entry is free.

Lewis Capaldi: First visit to Scarborough Open Air Theatre since 2019

Outdoor gig of the week; Lewis Capaldi, supported by Wild Youth and Aine Deane, Scarborough Open Air Theatre, Thursday, gates 6pm. CANCELLED

UPDATE: 10/8/2022

LEWIS Capaldi has pulled out of his August 11 gig at Scarborough Open Air Theatre. The reason? Illness.

Ticket holders will be reimbursed fully.

SCOTTISH singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi spent ten weeks at the top of the charts with his May 2019 debut album, Divinely Inspired To A Hellish Extent. Alas, the wait goes on for the follow-up, and all the while you will find such questions as “Is Lewis Capaldi quitting?” and “What has happened to Lewis Capaldi” on the internet.

In July, the 25-year-old Glaswegian told his Latitude festival audience “I have no new music to play you”, calling himself “horribly lazy” when faced with “needing to finish my new album”. Looks like you will have to make do with Before You Go, Grace, Hollywood, Bruises et al once more on Thursday; the heartbeat of his first visit to Scarborough OAT in 2019 . Box office: scarboroughopenairtheatre.com.

Much ado about Nothing & Everything Else…and Z Is For Zelda at Theatre@41

Double bill of the week: Black Sheep Theatre in Nothing & Everything Else/Z Is For Zelda, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, August 10 to 13, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee

SHOWCASING the work of playwright and director Bethany Shilling, the first play is an offbeat comedy about a young woman performing at her very first stand-up comedy open-mic night where she uses the time to check in with herself mentally. 

The second is an attempt by Zelda Fitzgerald to share her life story. In doing so, she flits between her polished, performed self and the obscure ramblings that consume her mind. Is she mad or is this the final act of Zelda’s undeniable character? Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

Seth Lakeman: Next Saturday’s main-stage headliner at The Magpies Festival. Picture: Tom Griffiths

Folk festival of the week: The Magpies Festival, Sutton Park, Sutton-on-the-Forest, near York, August 12, music from 6pm; August 13, music from 12.30pm

THE Magpies Festival has expanded from one day at last summer’s inaugural event to two in 2022, hosted again by The Magpies’ transatlantic folk trio of Bella Gaffney, Kate Griffin and Holly Brandon, ahead of this autumn’s release of their new album, Undertow.

Next Friday’s line-up will be: Jaywalkers; Elanor Moss; John Smith; Chris Elliott & Caitlin Jones and headliners Rob Heron & The Tea Pad Orchestra. Next Saturday presents Honey & The Bear; Dan Webster Band; Katie Spencer; The People Versus; David Ward Maclean; The Jellyman’s Daughter; Rory Butler; The Magpies plus guests; The 309s; The Drystones and main-stage headliner Seth Lakeman. Look out too for the food market and craft fair. Box office: themagpiesfestival.co.uk/tickets

The poster for York Walls Festival 2022

Heritage event of the week: York Walls Festival 2022 Summer Weekend, August 13 and 14

THE Friends of York Walls will be partnering with York organisations and community groups to tell stories and promote “our shared community, history and heritage” next weekend.

The Friends look after the 500-year-old Fishergate Postern Tower on behalf of City of York Council and it is sure to feature in the festival, along with the Bar walls and Red Tower. For festival updates, head to: yorkwallsfestival.org.

Joshua Burnell & Band: Autumn tour takes in The Crescent in his home city of York. Picture: Elly Lucas

The future of folk: Joshua Burnell & Band, The Crescent, York, October 16, 8pm

JOSHUA Burnell & Band will play a home-city gig at The Crescent on his nine-date folk-fused baroque’n’roll autumn tour.

Multi-instrumentalist singer Burnell will be joined by globe-trotting violinist Frances Archer, guitarist Nathan Greaves, multi-instrumentalist Oliver Whitehouse, drummer Ed Simpson and vocalist Frances Sladen. “Think The War On Drugs meets Seth Lakeman on Ziggy Stardust’s spaceship,” he suggests. Tickets: joshuaburnell.co.uk/tour or ticketweb.co.uk.

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REVIEW: York Settlement Community Players in Ayckbourn’s Woman In Mind ****

Desperately seeking Susan, as she loses her mind: Victoria Delaney in the Settlement Players’ Woman In Mind. All pictures: John Saunders

Woman In Mind, York Settlement Community Players, York Theatre Royal Studio, until Saturday, 7.45pm and 2.45pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

ANGIE Millard “seemed to have avoided Alan Ayckbourn” in her past directorial choices, but she had one play in mind for the Settlement Players’ return to York Theatre Royal after two years.

Ayckbourn’s sad, haunting, darker than dark-humoured psychological drama Woman In Mind had struck a chord in the pandemic climate of isolation and mental health issues.

Premiered in 1985 but still feeling present day in 2022, it remains Ayckbourn’s supreme study of a trapped woman, older than Nora in A Doll’s House but just as affecting as the desperate flight of Henrik Ibsen’s proto-feminist, Susan’s story being told from inside her woozy head.

The setting is 48 hours in her south London garden and beyond: the place where the world is refracted through the prism of Susan’s psyche.

Playing fantasy families: Victoria Delaney’s Susan raises a glass to husband Andy (Paul French), daughter Lucy (Amy Hall) and brother Tony (Neil Vincent)

Following in the footsteps of Julia McKenzie, Stockard Channing and Helen Mirren, in her first stage role since October 2019, Victoria Delaney opens the play on her back and never leaves the stage (interval aside).

Delaney’s suburban housewife is coming round from unconsciousness, after knocking herself out when stepping on a garden rake, as Chris Pomfrett’s cautious yet accident-prone family doctor, Bill Windsor, attends to her. In a brilliant Ayckbourn conceit, his words, like her vision, go from a gobbledygook blur to being clear.

With the bang on the head comes the comforting concern of her champagne-golden  family, as if torn from a Mills & Boon cover or a desirable clothes catalogue: first, handsome old devil husband Andy (Paul French); then tennis-playing brother Tony (Neil Vincent) and her auburn-haired darling of a daughter, Lucy (YSCP debutante Amy Hall).

Too, too perfect, surely, and yet played as straight down the line as Tony practising a backhand winner, they could – at first at least – be real. We see and hear them, just as Susan sees and hears them, but only she does so, just like only urbane novelist Charles Condomine and the audience see and hear his deceased first wife, Elvira, in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit.

Living on a prayer: Paul Toy as vicar Gerald

The grim reality is very different: husband Gerald (clergyman’s son Paul Toy) is a self-obsessed priggish vicar, always in another room writing his interminably dull, interminably long parish history since 1387. They have reached the separate bed stage already.

Live-in sister-in-law Muriel (Helen Wilson) is obsessed with reconnecting with her late husband and is forever making foul-tasting beverages and even fouler meals, defeated by the lack of labelling on kitchen ingredients.

Wastrel son Rick (YSCP newcomer Frankie-Jo Anderson) is estranged and strange, having joined a cult in Hemel Hempstead, but suddenly he arrives with news.

Where once Susan loved being a wife and mother, now she is neglected by husband and son alike and unfulfilled in her humdrum, loveless domestic domain, Symbolically, the garden plants in Richard Hampton’s design are reduced to twigs, with the only flowers being on the backdrop tapestries, Susan’s bench and Muriel’s cardigan. What lies ahead beyond Susan’s disillusioned forties, her days as frustrating and stuck as a buffering laptop screen?

Muriel (Helen Wilson) serves up another gruesome beverage to vicar Gerald’s (Paul Toy) distaste

Ayckbourn, and in turn Millard and Delaney, capture a “woman on the verge”, and as the real and unreal worlds collide increasingly beyond her control, so too do the ever-blackening humour and pathos, her sanity crumbling and the words returning once more to gobbledygook.

Delaney’s performance is deeply unsettling, her Susan being full of vulnerability, waspish of tongue, her mind grasping desperately at the cliff’s edge, happiness out of reach.

Pomfrett, in particular, provides the comedy, perfectly in step with Ayckbourn’s rhythms; Toy makes the supercilious vicar utterly unbearable but splendidly sets himself up for laughter at his expense; Wilson judges just right how to be annoying yet not annoying as the never-wanted-where-she-is Muriel. Anderson’s disingenuous Rick would fall out with anyone.

French, Hall and Vincent are perfectly well cast as the fantasy family that gradually turns into a nightmare and Woman In Mind becomes a woman out of her mind.

Angie Millard was right: Ayckbourn’s play has indeed taken on even more resonance under the pandemic microscope, where already unhappy marriages have cracked under the strain and the desire to escape has been heightened in enforced isolation.

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‘There are so few plays that feature a woman like this,’ says Woman In Mind director Angie Millard. ‘Hedda Gabler and that’s it.’ Meet Alan Ayckbourn’s Susan

Victoria Delaney and Neil Vincent shelter under an umbrella in a February rehearsal for the Settlement Players’ production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman In Mind. Picture: John Saunders

ANGIE Millard has directed myriad plays but “seemed to have avoided” Alan Ayckbourn…until now.

“The present climate of isolation and mental health issues led me to Woman In Mind, which is a perfect choice for this time,” she says, ahead of her York Settlement Community Players production opening on Saturday in the York Theatre Royal Studio.

One of 87 full-length works by the Scarborough playwright, 1985’s Woman In Mind’s portrait of a woman in the verge finds housewife Susan stuck, unfulfilled and neglected in her humdrum marriage.

As played by Victoria Delaney, who remains on stage throughout, Susan’s growing disillusionment with everyday life is brought to a head when she steps on a garden rake and is knocked unconscious.

Whereupon her minor concussion and hallucinations combine to surround Susan with the ideal fantasy family, handsomely dressed in tennis whites as they sip champagne. However, when her real and imaginary worlds collide, those fantasies take on a nightmarish life of their own in Ayckbourn’s hotbed of humour and pathos.

“You can see Ayckbourn’s plays over and over again and still see something new in them each time; they’re so rich in detail,” says Angie. “I love Woman In Mind, and I’m working with very talented and creative people who make every rehearsal a joy, though the problem we’ve faced is the limited amount of time we’ve had to rehearse.

“We’ve been doing just three hours on Sundays, two hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, with the Mondays for intensive sessions for the two-hander scenes, followed by a week in tech.

Victoria Delaney: On stage from start to finale in Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman In Mind

“You need the time to explore the lines, to find the humour, to bring a light touch to it, as it’s that subtle, offhand way that Ayckbourn has in his writing.”

Explaining her reasoning behind selecting Woman In Mind, Angie says: “Because of Susan. I feel there are so few plays that feature a woman like this. Hedda Gabler and that’s it.

“That’s important now in a society where people are having mental health problems – and Susan has massive mental health problems. The pandemic has also thrown up an increased awareness of isolation and of not being happy in a relationship, which has been exacerbated in the lockdowns.”

Angie notes how Susan’s husband Gerald, busy writing his magnus opus on the history of the parish, “doesn’t know how to deal with Susan”. “Men in Ayckbourn’s plays rarely do. It’s a position they take where, over the years, they slide away from their responsibilities in relationships or in their workplace, and that’s rarely something women get to do,” she says.

“But this is where Ayckbourn is really clever, because you also see Susan for who she is. You ask yourself, ‘why did she marry him?’. When Gerald asks, ‘what did I do wrong?’, she says, ‘’Married me’.

“Yes, he’s let her down, he’s a disappointment, but marriages are about a contract and a bargain. It’s about acceptance.” 

Putting Susan’s character on the psychiatrist’s couch, Angie says: “Most people who end up unwell mentally have an addiction, though with Susan, I can’t attribute an addiction to her, except an addiction to perfection.

York Settlement Community Players’ poster for Woman In Mind

“If you’re classically depressed, it’s because the world doesn’t see you as you see yourself, but you have to get over that and not see yourself as so important.”

Victoria Delaney will be joined in Millard’s cast by company stalwarts Chris Pomfrett, Paul Toy, Helen Wilson and Paul French and newcomers Frankie-Jo Anderson, Neil Vincent and Amy Hall in Settlement Players’ first Theatre Royal production since Chekhov’s The Seagull in pre-Covid March 2020.

“This is the first role I’ve done since Covid started,” says Victoria. “My last one was in a play I wrote myself, Mad Alice, in October 2019, and my plan at the time was to start my own company, do a Yorkshire tour and then maybe take it to the Edinburgh Fringe, but then the pandemic happened and it just wasn’t possible. I’ll wait for things to settle down and then I can return to that plan or more writing.

“So, when I saw the casting call-out for Woman In Mind, I jumped at it. I did my research and requested to audition for two roles, Susan and Muriel, as I love comedy and I would have loved to play Muriel too, but what a peach of a part Susan is.”

Victoria initially took a break from her professional acting career after her divorce to focus on being a single mum with an autistic son – who will turn 20 in the summer – and she now works remotely from home giving legal advice on Zoom to families with special educational needs up to the age of 25.

Her acting and writing come into play when the opportunity arises.  “But in my work, I do also sometimes have to think creatively about how the law might get over a problem,” she says.

Rehearsing for an Ayckbourn play has been such a stimulating challenge. “It’s a comedy but it’s a dark comedy, which means I can show lots of sides to Susan. There are moments where I can play the comedy; moments where she’s really vulnerable, or indignant, or annoyed,” says Victoria.

“I’m going to really miss her because she takes you over,” says Victoria Delaney of playing housewife Susan in Woman In Mind. Here she is pictured by John Saunders, masked up in the rehearsal studio

“There’s just so much to her character, and because I never leave the stage, I get to interact with so many characters. I’m going to really miss her because she takes you over. I’ve been called for every rehearsal because Susan is in every scene, and as I have to go through so many emotions, I then need to let those emotions , that adrenaline, seep away.”

To learn all those lines, “I’ve been walking around the village, doing laps at 6am, listening to the play,” says Victoria, who lives in Wheldrake.

She finds liberation in playing a character of such emotional contrasts. “I’ll say things on stage that I would never say myself. Things that I would consider rude. I’d have too many filters to go through to say them!” she says.

“But the absolute drug of acting is to be able to show the audience all these emotions, this sadness, and when you feel them connect with you, I love that connection.

“I’ve meet lot of actors that have a certain shyness about them in their own lives. I mask it, but I have a shy side, and when people say, ‘but you go out on stage’, I say, ‘yes, but I’m playing someone else and I love doing that’.”

As chance would have it, when facing such a demanding week ahead, “luckily the performances are over half-term”, says Victoria, breathing a little more easily at the prospect.

York Settlement Community Players in Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman In Mind, York Theatre Royal Studio, Saturday until February 26, except February 20; 7.45pm plus 2.45pm, February 26. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.