Alan Ayckbourn’s modern morality play, which satirized the materialism of Thatcher’s Britain, returns to the Olivier Theatre where it premiered in 1987. Everybody steals. Everybody bends the rules. Shop-lifting, swindling, bribing, blackmailing, industrial espionage, large-scale fraud; you name it, these things are the norm. There is no moral code. Only fools are honest and have principles.
The play has a typical Ayckbourn gimmick. The set is “the biggest dolls’ house in the world” on two floors and the same set is used for three different houses and this allows for simultaneous action in different rooms and fast intercutting between them. Adam Penford’s production gets off to a hilarious start; but then the opening scene is one of the funniest ever written.
Nigel Lindsay heads the cast as the paterfamilias who has no inkling of the greed and corruption within his own family circle. “Surely,” he says, “somewhere there’s got to be a minimum level of decent human behaviour, hasn’t there? Beneath which none of us sink.” There isn’t. The whole barrel is rotten. He determines to run an honest family furniture business, but quickly ends up as a Mafioso Godfather, conniving at murder, prostitution, money-laundering and drug-running.
Lindsay is good casting. So is Matthew Cottle, a regular Ayckbourn player, as a creepy and eminently corruptible private investigator. There is also a delightful cameo by Gawn Grainger as a doddery granddad.