Mixed Doubles

Mixed Doubles / Studio, South Hill Park / March 24

MARRIAGE is a three-ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring and suffering.
  The 16 sketches in this Entertainment on Marriage begin with the euphemisms of the upright vicar. The pieces signpost the anniversaries of suffering from the banns that bind.
  Eight monologues by George Melly have the originality of three-ring circus acts. The cast whip life in to the cartoon lines of the characters. Exaggeration and gesture are used for a rewarding result.
  The duologues by Alun Owen, Fay Weldon and Alan Ayckbourn offer the actors a text from which to draw out more complex characters. This is seized upon to good effect. Kingsley Glover is the confused lover put out like a suburban recyclable by Alexandra Tansy Ireland, dispassionate in ending the affair that was an alternative to langour.
  Rhonda Sabrina Howell uses pace and pause to bring out the comic in The Nanny.
 In Weldon's Permanence she shows without stereotyping the doggedness of a woman stone-walled by an unsympathetic and taciturn partner.
  Countdown by Ayckbourn shows marital suffering as a breakdown of communication. Alan Wadlan exhibits attentive skill in switching between his spoken thought and cross-fire speech.
  Night by Harold Pinter is where conversation sits in the silence between pronouncements. Ali Mercer and Gareth David-Lloyd stumble through their differing recollections, hoarding and pointing the words like gemstones. Awesome as a starry night.

William Campbell