Cast

Synopsis

Communicating Doors is not one of Alan Ayckbourn’s common observations of human frailty but a mystifying thriller pervaded by a sense of impending danger. Imagine stepping through a door and finding yourself in the same place but 20 years earlier, and coming face-to-face with someone whose future you know, and when and how they died. You then discover they too can step back a further 20 years and also have knowledge of people in that time. The possibilities for altering the future are tempting but the dangers are multiplying. Do you bolt back to the security of your own time or do you stay?

Directors Notes

The idea of being able to travel through time has fascinated people for many years and has been explored in many ways, from Victorian novels to modern fantasy films. Linked with this are the questions of whether we would be able to meet our younger selves or learn if we fulfil our dreams, or whether we could improve our present situation by altering something in our history. We struggle with the logic of whether, it someone dies in the past who is alive in the present, they really died. Tonight’s play hinges on such thoughts and, far from the doom and gloom prevalent in much of time travel fiction, Alan Ayckbourn’s comic touch is very evident in Communicating Doors – doors which provide communication between times as well as between rooms.