Island Theatre at the Library
December 15-16, 2007
Season's Greetings by Alan Ayckbourn
Directed by Ken Grantham
Season's Greetings starts on Christmas Eve in the home of Neville and Belinda Bunker. Belinda is rushing around decorating the tree and seeing to all the guests and their needs. Belinda's sister Rachel is in a state about novelist Clive coming to stay for a few days. Pregnant Pattie and her husband Eddie are permanently at loggerheads while in the kitchen Auntie Phyllis is quietly getting sloshed on the cooking wine. Bernard is involved in a chaotic rehearsal of his annual gift for the children, a sixteen-scene puppet show of The Three Little Pigs. Then there's Uncle Harvey, watching bloodthirsty films on television and as full of the Christmas spirit as a broken ornament.
Before long, thanks to Ayckbourn's unrivalled ability to recognise human frailties, the characters are either at one another's throats or on the verge of committing adultery…
Alan Ayckbourn is the award winning Artistic Director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre and one of the world’s most popular and prolific professional playwrights. He has written 70 full length plays and more than 20 other revues and plays for children. He is also an internationally acclaimed director, who Arthur Miller said directed the definitive version of his play A View From The Bridge.
Mr. Ayckbourn's notes from a past production:
"Season’s Greetings is my second play to be concerned with Christmas and with what might be termed its more grisly side. The first was Absurd Person Singular (performed by Island Theatre in 2005) which dealt, I hope fairly humorously, with three of the most awful festivities imaginable. Why then return to the scene of the crime, as it were?
I think in part because, this time, I wanted to paint the rosier side of the picture. To write instead about log fires, Christmas trees, excited children’s faces, candle-light, the holly and the mistletoe. The Bunkers’ home has all these. It’s comfy and cosy and it swarms with children. Not the smaller, shorter variety though who remain unseen, usually lurking just out of sight in muddy gum boots.
But the taller older ones are on view. Those currently going through the ‘awkward’ age, the twenty-five to seventy year olds— they’re all there. Fighting over their toys, clamoring for attention, bullying, sneaking and crying, then kissing and making up and generally getting far too overexcited, as they always do every year at Christmas.
Season’s Greetings is a play about love and about, as Rachel puts it, how unfair it all is.
And success and failure.
And jealousy and self-deception.
And greed and envy and lust and gluttony.
Just an average family Christmas. And looming over the proceedings in true pantomime spirit the shadows of two eccentric uncles, the good angel and the bad one… "