Cast

Synopsis

3 rooms, 4 couples, an unstable mixture. Bedroom Farce, takes place in the bedrooms of three married couples during one very long night.

Ernest and Delia are celebrating their wedding anniversary after many, many years of marriage; newlyweds Malcolm and Kate are gearing up to host a party in their new ‘love nest’; while Nick and Jan are trying to cope with Nick’s recent back injury which has left him stuck in bed while Jan goes to Malcolm and Kate’s party without him. Each couple’s relationship has problems, but they are all tested when Trevor and Susannah’s dysfunctional, miserable marital issues are inflicted upon them …. in their own bedrooms! Leaving a wave of destruction behind them as they lament on the state of their marriage, Trevor and Susannah ruffle beds, tempers, and routines to try and find their way back to each other.

Hilarious, touching, and fast paced, Bedroom Farce is one Ayckbourn’s funniest plays. Anything but a typical bedroom farce – though we hear about a range of sexual troubles – Is marriage sustained more by habit than mutual excitement? Or is there a certain blessedness?

Directors Notes

Good evening and welcome to BLT. After the Carnage of last year’s one room, two couples; I find myself with an exponential increase to the main stage, twice the couples and thrice the rooms.

Our season opener is almost as old as me, first staged in 1975 at Scarborough’s The Library Theatre, after Sir Peter Hall requested a play from Ayckbourn for the then newly located National Theatre’s Lyttelton auditorium: ‘I’m worrying about it a bit because I’ve never written for the posh fellers before. It’ll have everything about bedrooms but copulation, something which I believe is hardly practiced in the British bedroom anyway’ he stated in the Sunday Times. He also mentions regretting removing the subtitle ‘A Comedy’ as if to clarify that although called Bedroom Farce, it’s not actually a farce. Having recently been involved with Feydeau’s An AbsoluteTurkey, I can vouch for the differences – though we have tried to highlight the particularly farcical Britishness of these characters. Why are we so self-awareless?!

I have a vague recollection of performing an excerpt of one of Ayckbourn’s early pieces, Ernie’s Incredible Illucinations at my first youth theatre, Rawdon’s Young Idea circa 1982. Like our own Kaleidoscope, it provided an escape and an alternative education – an imagination education! Some of our cast’s first theatrical endeavours were as members of Kaleidoscope – now they’re taking on the challenge of Ayckbourn with rehearsal room relish. Space on the main stage is at a premium when you cover a third of it with beds and bedding – that’s probably why Ayckbourn pared down the original idea of all four bedrooms on a single stage – a more straightforward process in the round of Scarborough’s Library Theatre – to the (just about) stageable three.

Another similarity with last year’s God Of Carnage – a quickly written play with no room for rewrites. Started on a Wednesday – typed up at the weekend, on stage rehearsal on Monday. All while dealing with the opening (and closing) of his musical collaboration with Lloyd Webber: Jeeves. Ayckbourn says ‘I remember going in to see the cast (of Jeeves) on the last night and not feeling too bad about it as I had just finished Bedroom Farce that day’.

Another long night of catastrophic characters awaits so tuck yourself in and say your prayers, the party’s about to get interesting. Don’t have nightmares, hold on to your sex lives and don’t eat mackerel in bed