Absent Friends

Absent Friends
... at the Harold Pinter Theatre ...

Alan Ayckbourn's play, Absent Friends, is playing in the West End right now. Ayckborun wrote over 75 plays, and 42 of them have been done in the West End.

Rebecca and I had tickets for the back row of the Royal Circle, which is a long way away from the centre of the stage. When the theatre doors closed and the lights dimmed, we had our purses, bags and coats packed and were ready to move forward so that we could get seats in the second row of the balcony. At the rise of the safety curtain, we settled back to enjoy a period piece from the 1970's. Apparently I missed that decade of music. Rebecca knew the songs piped into the theatre before the show began, and could identify the one song that was sung at the end of the play as the curtain fell.

There is always something painful in the theatre -- that moment when you might just see yourself or your ideas on stage. I liked the pithy sentence from a former review of this play -- a play in which friends have gathered together to sympathize with an old friend who has lost his fiancee through drowning. The reviewer says, "better a swift demise [like the death of your fiancee], perhaps, than the slow death of these relationships [of your other friends]in terminal decline.

Ouch! though we had such an afternoon of laughter.

Arta