Cast

Synopsis

In a peaceful rural clinic Benjamin Cooper provides comfort and satisfaction to his wealthy patients, by improving their looks with the aid of surgery. Angie Dell, a model at the peak of her powers, has had a blemish removed from her backside when the infamous surgeon Hravic Zyergefoove arrives for a visit. The media cannot keep away and events escalate to a wonderfully funny conclusion.

Directors Notes

‘Body Language’ premiered in Scarborough in May 1990, an extraordinarily daring play about a very topical public subject, the relationship between women’s bodies and their identities as perceived by others and by themselves. The idea had come to Ayckbourn in a Green Room conversation; an account of a terrible accident on the road to Leeds, when a car had driven under a low-loader lorry. It had reminded him of the death in a car crash of the American film star Jayne Mansfield, more famous for her big breasts than her acting ability. Speculating on what it must have been like for the traffic cop who had found the world’s most famous torso, Alan made the remark, as he often does when dealing with something unbearable, in the form of a black joke. At this point an actress drew attention to a scar on her own neck: she had once gone through a car windscreen. This was one of the rare occasions when, as Alan puts it, “it was like the clock striking and a little cuckoo coming out” and he felt he was being offered an idea for a play. ‘Body Language’ represents the furthest a male playwright has ventured into the minefield of a major feminist issue. Is it possible to write at all about women’s bodies without inviting criticism or causing hurt somewhere ?

Probably not.