Experience: 6/10

By Alan Ayckbourn

Directed by Patric Kearns

Company: Talking Scarlet

Venue: Connaught Theatre

Date: Wednesday 13th March 2013

This is a version of Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges; we’ve seen four others before, so we were keen to see how this one played out. The weather problems may have contributed to the small attendance, but even so the cast gave us a good performance, and it was an enjoyable enough evening. I found myself wishing for a full-on production sometime, with all the parts played by different actors, but that’s just a pipe dream for the moment. It would also be nice to have an Intimate Exchanges marathon sometime, but again I’ll have to wait.

This version took us down the route of an affair between Celia and Miles. Miles was married to Rowena, a free spirit type, while Celia was married to Toby, Miles’ best friend, who owed his job as headmaster of a local school to Miles’ role as chairman of the board of governors. Miles contrived to see Celia alone for dinner – she thought it would be a foursome – and made his play, ending up in the shed with his trousers round his ankles. Their affair was common gossip, and while Miles eventually returned to Rowena, Celia was stuck with an unsympathetic Toby.

The third act gave us the cricket match. It’s difficult with only two actors to show us all the necessary characters, but these two did very well. I did find myself distracted by the lack of accurate scoring at times – always a drawback when putting cricket on stage – but the development of the relationships was pretty clear and by this time the audience had warmed up a bit so there was more laughter as well. Stephen Beckett was particularly good when it came to Miles’ hesitant and bumbling way of talking; his ‘blah, blah, blah’ noises when fast forwarding through the speech he was rehearsing were very funny.

© 2013 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me