Absurd Person Singular: An Exploration of the Dark Depths of Human Nature
Photo: Andrew Alexander
OTTAWA — In 2008, John P. Kelly directed Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves at The Gladstone. It was hilarious.
This time, Kelly directs Ayckbourn’s later play Absurd Person Singular. It too is a hoot. Except when it turns dark. Then something truly ugly about human nature and one of its spinoffs, the class system, emerges.
Last year, the play celebrated its 40th anniversary – Anna Lewis’ costume design for this production includes bell bottom trousers and a head band – but the show’s snarling social satire remains vital.
The story finds three married couples gathering in one of their kitchens on three successive Christmas Eves. Two of the couples, Geoffrey and Eva Jackson and Ronald and Marion Brewster-Wright, are upper middle class, but as the seasons roll by their fortunes, both financial and marital, erode. Sidney and Jane Hopcroft, on the other hand, scramble out of the working class but never lose the stigma of their origin, both in their own eyes and in those of the others.
These are not couples anyone in their right mind would want to spend time with. As the play’s title suggests, each person is singular and absurd, unconnected in any meaningful way to his or her partner or to the rest of the world…….
Until March 23. Tickets: 613-233-4523, thegladstone.ca