Three Plays: Absurd Person Singular / Absent Friends / Bedroom Farce

by Alan Ayckbourn

A scathing comedy of social striving in the suburbs, Absurd Person Singular follows the fortunes of three couples who turn up in each other’s kitchens on three successive Christmases, to hilarious and devastating effect. In Absent Friends , Diana and Paul host a tea party for Colin, recently returned to England after the tragic drowning of his fiancée. But Colin proves impervious to their awkward attempts to console him as he unwittingly touches every raw nerve in the troubled lives of his old friends. The action of Bedroom Farce unfolds simultaneously—and uproariously—in the onstage bedrooms of three couples all in some way connected to an utterly self-absorbed fourth couple who heedlessly intrude on their friends’ privacy, leaving chaos in their wake.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre

229 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Sir Alan Ayckbourn is a popular and prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-three full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967. Major successes include Absurd Person Singular (1975), The Norman Conquests trilogy (1973), Bedroom Farce (1975), Just Between Ourselves (1976), A Chorus of Disapproval (1984), Woman in Mind (1985), A Small Family Business (1987), Man Of The Moment (1988), House & Garden (1999) and Private Fears in Public Places (2004). His plays have won numerous awards, including seven London Evening Standard Awards. They have been translated into over 35 languages and are performed on stage and television throughout the world. Ten of his plays have been staged on Broadway, attracting two Tony nominations, and one Tony award.

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ayckbourn is very much in the English tradition of witty playwrights writing about menial domestic issues. He is very funny, and very critical of the sort of bland normalcy of life for most people. Not that I think he wants people to have more exciting lives, but he wants to acknowledge that lives generally revolve around small conflicts, rather than the large sweeping epic concerns (life, death, murder, madness, etc.) of say Shakespeare.

[Mickaugrec · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three Plays is a terrific read. Alan Ayckbourn loves language, so it pays off for logophiles who won't necessarily see the pieces in stage production. Gratifying for both readers and small theatre companies is the use of minimal set changes or fixed sets for all the pieces. My own taste for melodrama and pathos made 'Absent Friends' a personal favorite; 'Bedroom Farce' is definitely / appropriately a farce (though definitely has enough heft and thought to elevate it from the Benny Hill show class). All of the pieces are English from early 1970s, but I did not find them dated, nor uniquely suited to UK sensibilities -- taut, searing satire of social climbing, 'keeping up appearances,' awkwardness in social norms and behavior. Curb Your Enthusiasm / Larry David aficionados will particularly enjoy these.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collects three plays by Alan Ayckbourn, each of which offer the sort of bleak, antiromantic view of relationships that make the married couples of Sondheim & Furth's Company seem narcotically copacetic by comparison. We're deep into Christopher Durang territory here, and a company taking any of these plays on must work hard to render the results of their stagecraft more funny than shrill.

Without giving anything away, here's a writing sample of action and not dialogue, along with a quick synopsis of each play in this anthology:

Absurd Person Singular - Here Ayckbourn contrasts the rise of an entrepreneur to nouveau riche against the social status fall of two establishment types (a banker and a lawyer) over three succeeding Christmas dinner parties, from the onstage offstage set of each of their respective kitchens. So in Act Two, we find husband Geoffrey torn between calling a doctor to halt wife Eva's repeated suicide attempts on the one hand and greeting party guests on the other (!)

GEOFFREY goes out. Silence. EVA finishes another note. A brief one. She tears it out and weights it down, this time with a tin of dog food which happens to be on the table. She gazes round, surveying the kitchen. She stares at the oven. She goes to it and opens it, looking inside thoughtfully. She reaches inside and removes a casserole dish, opens the lid, wrinkles her nose and carries the dish to the draining-board. Returning to the oven, she removes three shelves and various other odds and ends that seem to have accumulated in there. It is a very dirty oven. She looks at her hands, now grimy, goes to the kitchen drawer and fetches a nearly clean tea towel. Folding it carefully, she lays it on the floor of the oven. She lies down and sticks her head inside, as if trying it for size. She is apparently dreadfully uncomfortable. She wriggles about to find a satisfactory position.

That's right, the absurdity begins with a man leaving a disclosed suicide completely alone in a kitchen, is followed by some farcical business involving said suicide contending with the discomforts of testing an outrageously messy oven's fatal potential, is rounded off by the sudden intrusion of an OCD party-goer (startling her and causing her to clang her head off the oven's top shelf), and ultimately leads to the ridiculousness of this formally-dressed intruder/samaritan taking over oven-cleaning chores. Meanwhile, obliviousness of party-goers to the pathetic shenanigans of a suicide in their endless variations is intended to make for hilarious running schtick... and in good productions, probably does, so long as the audience isn't allowed to believe that Eva really wants to die (even though they might wholly sympathize with her reasons for trying to kill herself).

Probably not coincidentally, considerations of suicide bring us to Ayckbourn's next play of the trilogy,

Absent Friends - which inasmuch as it proved to be neither a memorable title nor premise for me, I'll argue to be the slightest of the three plays presented in this volume. Having refreshed my recollection, I can confidently state that this is a drawing room farce in which all the characters are gathered to pay tribute to/console an old comrade-in-arms who so recently lost his wife of six months to "accidental" drowning. The unrelenting awkwardness is entirely driven by the unraveling sexual politics of the host couple, a la Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, leading to the never resolved question: if these people all despise one another, why would they ever get together? As a running gag, it happens that none of these obnoxious interlopers ever met or knew the deceased, and so completely fail to recognize as genuine the new new-agey spiritualist attitude of the widower who seems so happy just to have experienced one brief encounter with happiness apart from his toxic "friends."

Finally,

Bedroom Farce - is bedroom farce, intercutting (through lighting) the simultaneous action of three different onstage bedrooms. This comedy bounces a catalyst couple (an immature wife abuser and his complicit victim) off three other heterosexual relationships. The catalyst couple is a wild top that sends each relationship it bops against reeling out of control. The couples struggling to find a new equilibrium include a pair of naive newlyweds (is there any other kind?); the oblivious, coddling parents of the wife abuser; and the marriage of the wife abuser's former love interest, who despite the appearances of an established, mature relationship, time, reflection, and distance, not yet moved on. Ayckbourn's happy thesis would seem to be that trusting, loving, long-term relationships are impossible unless anaesthetized in heaping doses of denial and cultivated inattention. Nice.

Structurally, each play here is a classic farce of the comedy-of-errors type (a genre I have discussed elsewhere on Goodreads), although much of the amusement derives from the hathos-rich absurdities engendered from the enforced interaction of poisonous people. There is less a parade of folly on display in this volume than a pageant of folks you hope never to be trapped in a room with. Of course, if you're in the theater helplessly watching these nonstop trainwrecks, you can't avoid feeling like a claustrophobe in a filthy, shag carpet elevator, all the more uncomfortable for fourth wall norms that preclude you getting out of your seat to slap the actors silly or otherwise participate in all the outbursts of frustrated screaming. Unless this is your idea of fun and/or you really hate your date, better plan to throw back diesel shots at intermission to survive the evening.

[Jillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three excellent plays about strained relationships and how they manifest in gatherings with old friends. I thought Absurd Person Singular was the best but enjoyed all of them. Aykborn certainly knows how to write plays with sharp humor that reveal the absurdities of everyday life, but he seems a bit confused about how to end them; all three just sort of fade out, and I doubt the audience would even realize the play was over. As a text, however, the technique actually works quite well; it's a reminder that life continues beyond what others see and that many of its problems can't be solved quickly or at all.

[Rachel Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alan Ayckbourn’s Three plays

Absurd Person Singular

This is the first of the three and my favourite, it takes place over three christmas’. Act 1-last Christmas, Act 2- this Christmas and Act 3- next Christmas. The play centres around three married couples in there kitchens preparing for a party and each act has a different couple who may have been guessed in the previous act. It is a funny play and Ayckbourn works so well with comedy and farce. Would love to see this performed!

Absent Friends

This play tells the story of Colin who has lost his fiancée and is now going to a tea party organised by his friends, the party are worried of how to react to Colin but on his arrival he is happy and optimistic contrasted to the rest of the group who are falling apart. This is Ayckbourn’s shorter plays and is very popular, to be honest I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. Again I would enjoy it if I saw it on stage.

Bedroom Farce

This play is set in three bedrooms over the course of one night and the following morning, this was a complicated one but once I got my head round the characters and what was going on I could enjoy it more.

[Angelique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sitcoms before sitcoms. I read Ayckbourn's playwriting book where he talks about what he does and how to reveal information and it's pretty slick. Absurd Person Singular is one of the funniest plays I've ever seen. However both Absent Friends and Bedroom Farce are pretty forgettable (could be because I haven't seen them staged!). Absent Friends=cream on head and Bedroom Farce, better than Absent Friends imo=shelves.

Sometimes I think his being clever gets in the way of good theatre.

And oh dear, he uses oh dear a lot.

Oh dear.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved Bedroom Farce, but found the other two not as enjoyable to read. However, I think Absurd Person Singular would be extremely fun to stage and direct.

[Charlie Lee]

Ayckbourn is very perceptive about domestic situations and inter-personal conflicts. His characters are realistic and conflict in very believable ways. He also manages to pull through a lot of humour through the idiosyncrasies of his characters, while sort of good-naturedly poking fun at suburban living.

However, he's not particularly innovative or exciting. He's kind of a typical 70s playwright, with witty characters getting into arguments that usually resolve in some way, hiding a sort of inner sentimentality. If you like quiet, domestic dispute plays then he does these well. If you prefer something with a little more excitement, then perhaps you'd be better of with Pinter or Churchill's work from this time period.

[Debbie Hill]

Read a 1979 Penguin Books Ltd. version of this book with a different cover and a different ISBN: (ISBN 0-14-048-150-8).

[Doreen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bought this in Cork, and kept it at my bedside for years. B acted in an adaptation of Absurd Person Singular, which I think was the driving force behind the purchase (also, I love scripts,) and I found Ayckbourn on the whole witty, trenchant etc. And then I grew up and got married.

And let me tell you, I'm one of those people who thinks very dimly of the sitcoms where the married couples just bicker and are mean to each other and this is somehow supposed to be funny. It's not, it's awful, and I feel desperately sorry for anyone who thinks this is acceptable or, worse, aspirational. To a certain extent, I do blame Ayckbourn and his ilk for making that sort of bedroom farce (if you'll excuse the pun) the standard by which so many drearily untalented "comedy" writers measure themselves, as at least 85% of the latter forget that the entire point isn't that these miserable people are married, it's that they're miserably married, and honestly probably shouldn't be married at all (but we'll save the rant for the Western world's fetishization of death-do-us-part marriages for another time.) Ayckbourn used comedy to highlight the absurdity of the (ostensibly British, but really quite universal) middle-class and its ambitions, and nothing was more symbolic of such than their marriages. When I was younger, before marriage and motherhood, I thought these plays much funnier than I do now. Nowadays, while I'm thankful to have enough self-awareness to avoid most of the traps these poor, unhappy people fall into, I can't laugh at them as easily as I once could. Nowadays, I can't help seeing the tragedy lurking just beneath, and it takes away a little of the pleasure these plays once gave me.

[tenderfoot]

Absurd Person Singular, Absent Friends, and Bedroom Farce

[Victoria]

lagi getol2nya baca script Bedroom Farce, secara I'm one of the players!

[Mills College Library]

812.54 A974t 1975

[Susannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absurd Person Singular finished on October 8, 1997 for Modern British Drama class.