THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

Northcott Theatre, Exeter

Alan Ayckbourn is the second most commonly performed playwright after Shakespeare. A theatre reviewer therefore has plenty of opportunity to study how Ayckbourn can be played. There are two ways: the right way, and the 'funny' way. The right way recognises that if you perform the script straight, without comic delivery and humorous characterisation, the laughs still come. And recognises that whilst Ayckbourn successfully hits the funnybone of Middle England, a blow to the funnybone is usually accompanied by discomfort.

Unfortunately this production opts vigorously for the funny way. Whenever there is a wrong but superficially comic way of doing something, this production seizes the moment with both hands. No opportunity for a cheap laugh is lost, regardless of the fact that it trashes both the acuity of Ayckbourn's vision and the essence of his material. Even the physical fight between the lovers Barbara (Lynette Edwards) and Hamish (Paul Antony-Barber) - a potentially shocking scene which provides perfect contrast with the comic lines before and after it - is played virtually in slow motion, with pauses for the audience to chortle at some of the more hilarious blows.

The problem with this approach is that it places the audience entirely in permanent laugh mode, rendering them immune to the bleakness which seeps into the piece like an old stain on fresh wallpaper. Instead of riding the carefully crafted emotional rollercoaster created by one of the world's finest bittersweet playwrights, they sit waiting for the next laugh cue like the studio audience on a cheap TV sitcom. The silence from the auditorium during the more downbeat parts of the script is not the sound of an audience moved or discomfited: it is the abeyance of punters eagerly anticipating the next comedy set-up so that they can laugh some more.

One cannot blame the audience for this: years of Pavlovian training by the television companies means that if you give them a production played within the conventions of mediocre sitcom, that is how they will respond. But nor can one blame the players. It is the director's responsibility to tell actor Mike Burns that Gilbert is a complex, low-key and essentially sad character, and should therefore not be played as though he were Colin the hapless handyman, despite the fact that Mr Burns played that role to great acclaim in seven series of The Brittas Empire. It is the director's responsibility to tell Sukie Smith that women who are still trapped in the throws of their schoolgirl crushes are not automatically gawky and unable to pwonouce their Rs. It is the director's responsibility to ensure that a stage production is more than a cheap rehash of television's less inventive stereotypes, particularly when those stereotypes are forced willy-nilly onto a script which offers considerably more depth.

I described the Northcott Theatre's last production of Ayckbourn as "lulling the audience into laughter, leading them chortling to the point where they suddenly become unsure what exactly they were laughing at". It was a perfect example of how Ayckbourn should be staged. It is therefore particularly ironic that it is the Northcott which is now offering a definitive example of how Ayckbourn should not be staged - however much the audience may laugh.

Toby O'Connor Morse

Runs to 15 September (box office 01392 493493), then at the Haymarket Theatre Basingstoke from 18 to 29 September (box office 01256 465566)