Theatre in Review: Arrivals and Departures (Stephen Joseph Theatre/59E59)

	Bill Champion, Elizabeth Boag. Photo: Andrew Higgens

It's Alan Ayckbourn's 75th birthday and we're getting the presents. To celebrate his three-score-plus-five, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Ayckbourn's home base for decades, has brought us a gift package of three of the master's plays, two of them world premieres. I'd like to personally say cheers, and I hope I'm not being ungrateful when I suggest that the biggest, shiniest offering, Arrivals and Departures, might not be the best place to start if you're not already familiar with the author's skill at probing the lunacy that lurks beneath the surface of contemporary British life. Arrivals and Departures juggles farce and tragedy in a way that the playwright's admirers will instantly recognize, but this time the juxtaposition is more awkward than exhilarating; in addition, Ayckbourn, a man of a million formal devices, has hung his play on a structural trick that is less than scintillating. At the same time, Arrivals and Departures features one of his most devastatingly realized characterizations, here rendered in a remarkably funny and touching performance by the actor Kim Wall.

Arrivals and Departures begins as Ayckbourn's comedy for the age of terror. We are in a disused area of a London train station where members of the SSDO Group (Strategic Security Distraction Operations), an apparently fictional government operation staging a series of maneuvers designed to trap a terrorist code-named Cerastes, who, it is believed, is making an imminent arrival by train. You might not think of this as an ideal farce setup, but you would be wrong. Quentin, the unit's pompous, pig-headed officer, has choreographed a nightmarishly complicated series of staged episodes, apparently involving real travelers but in fact designed to surround and capture Cerastes. As the lights come up, things are looking grim, because each run-through is more disastrous than the one before, closer to Noises Off than Smiley's People. One couple treats their "baby" like the fake prop it is; the off-stage "football supporters" are carrying on as if inebriated; a woman impersonating a Scandinavian tourist has an accent so bad that, Quentin says in despair, "The closest she's ever been to Norway is Botswana."

Adding to Quentin's list of woes is the appearance of Pvt. Ez Swain -- formerly First Lieutenant Swain -- a prickly, borderline-insubordinate young woman facing a court-martial who has been assigned to guard Barry, a middle-aged traffic warden from Harrogate who can positively identify Cerastes from an incident over a disputed parking ticket. Left on their own while Quentin goes off to rally his troops, Ez and Barry make the oddest of couples. She is brusque, uncommunicative, bristling with hostility; he is a motormouthed old duffer, an endless fund of clichéd conversation and wheezy old jokes, thrilled to escape his mundane life for half a day, and blissfully unaware that to Ez his voice is like nails on a chalkboard.

You know the type; Barry is the cheerful chappie who sits next to you on a train or plane and proceeds to engage you -- willing or not -- in conversation for the duration of the trip, innocently driving you into a state of insanity. (In one particularly telling moment, Barry refuses a first-class train ticket, because you can't get a word out of the well-heeled travelers.) For example, here's Barry's idea of sparkling conversation: "Never gets boring does the weather, eh? Just when you've finished talking about it, it all changes. I tell you, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else but here. Nothing to talk about to strangers, otherwise, is there? No, in my opinion it's one of the things that makes this country great is the weather." You can see Ez's spine stiffen in response.

As it happens, Barry and Ez are more alike than they realize, as each has been shaped by a long series of tragedies and disappointments. As Barry natters on, Ez slips into a series of flashbacks revealing her grief over her late father, a soldier killed in action; her fury at her weak-willed, man-dependent mother; her profound discomfort with intimacy; and a love affair that ends in rape. This takes us up to intermission. Act II rewinds the action back to the meeting of Ez and Barry, replaying long stretches of dialogue while presenting a parade of scenes from Barry's past, including his marriage to a domestic martyr; a daughter who drifts away; and a business that slips through his fingers when he unwittingly allows his most trusted employee to rob him blind. Most of these episodes are marked by Ayckbourn's cruelly sharp eye for the selfishness that lurks under his characters' everyday conversation, but as the action moves from near-slapstick to melancholy domestic drama to a brutal, unexpected act of violence, the play gradually slackens.

A major portion of the trouble is structural; the flashbacks give us the general line of Ez and Barry's histories, but only in spotty fashion. The brutal end of Ez's love affair is so sketchily rendered that it isn't entirely believable; similarly, Ayckbourn never really shows how the stoic younger version of Barry becomes his garrulous older self. And it really doesn't help that we are asked to sit twice through some distinctly unmemorable scenes of small talk.

Under Ayckbourn's direction, the early mishaps plaguing Quentin's company unfold like prime bits of backstage comedy. Quentin himself is a classic comic type -- the put-upon bureaucrat -- and it is delightful to imagine what the great British comic actor Kenneth Williams might have done with the part. In any case, Bill Champion is just fine, his voice rising to new heights of fury in the face of each new obstacle. Ez is a one-note character and something of a drag at that, but Elizabeth Boag works hard to give her some shadings. The evening is entirely dominated by Kim Wall's Barry, always ready with another bromide and a bad joke, endlessly prepared to repeat himself, and determined to get a smile out of Ez. For Barry, conversation -- much of it not really honest, as we learn -- is his defense against a loneliness that he cannot acknowledge. In what may be the most beautifully realized moment of the evening, Ez tells Barry off in no uncertain terms, informing him that they have nothing in common. The little man sits, stunned at the seeming randomness of her anger, barely able to process her words; in a voice that reveals a world of hurt, he quietly replies that now they will never know what they have in common. A moment of stillness has rarely said so much.

The members of the supporting cast, all of them triple- and quadruple-cast, do very well, especially Sarah Stanley as Nadine, Ez's clinging-vine mother; Ben Porter as Nadine's not-entirely trustworthy boyfriend; and Emily Pithon as Barry's grown daughter, Daisy, who, with a smile and a tiny apology, delivers a coup de grâce that is far more cruel than the murder with which the play reaches its climax.

The production design includes a simple set and bountiful costumes -- all of them marvels of observation -- by Jan Bee Brown, as well as lighting by Tigger Johnson that effortlessly takes us from past to present. No sound designer is credited, but surely somebody is responsible for the production's parade of skillfully rendered effects.

Arrivals and Departures has its share of fine moments and Ayckbourn's fans will no doubt be unable to resist a brand-new work. But this one is something of a jumble of tones and ideas; hang on, however, because there are two more packages to unwrap.--David Barbour