Vintage Ayckbourn from Q2 Players

3:36pm Friday 16th May 2008

Even theatre critics can get writer's block, so your reviewer sympathised with the frustrated members of the writing circle in Ayckbourn's Improbable Fiction. They all have stories in their heads, but how can they get them down on paper?

Q2 Players' production was vintage Ayckbourn: fine character observation, time twists, personality clashes, sub-farce action but his habitual slow start. The cast were restrained in a jolly trot until the second half when they leapt into vigorous gallop at the scary about-turn, when the characters created by the (now homeward-bound) would-be writers come to life in a storm-induced phantasmagoria.

Chris Hodges nicely played our hapless host Arnold, eager to please, swaying in all directions as he nurses delicate egos of his fledgling writers as they variously clash.

Vivvi (Veronica Martin), anxious and placatory, made a foil to Frances Billington's blunt and prickly smallholder, Jess, whose down-to-earth coarseness is a cover for her own insecurity. The browbeaten and mousey Grace (Liz Smith) was the butt of Michael Daly's well-drawn Brevis, an overbearing retired schoolmaster, dismissive and pedantic, as incontinent in his bladder as in his ambitions as a librettist: an adaptation of Pilgrim's Progress! All regard nerdy Clem (Scott Tilley) as an outsider, as he knows about computers and is a sci-fi fanatic.

Caroline Davies portrayal of Ilsa, the young neighbour who comes to granny-sit Arnold's elderly mum was as accurate as it was charming.

What an opportunity for the cast to show its skills in a crazy lucky dip of romance, fantasy, detective story, and nursery tales!

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