I have chosen the play ‘Drinking Companion’ to study for several reasons. One of these is that the main character, Harry, is not unlike many middle aged men.
The scene is set in a 3-star hotel bar, and Harry approaches a young lady, Paula, alone in the foyer and buys her drinks continuously at the hotel bar, trying to get her to go up to his hotel room. He tries many different methods of doing this such as complementing Paula, embellishing on his job description, avoids questions about his wife and children and quickly changes subject and lies blatantly about his age. I think the comedy comes from the fact that so many people have come across people like Harry in similar situations that they can relate to the sort of person that he is, or remember people that they have met similar to him.
The situation that Harry is in is not in itself funny at all; actually the contrary is the case. All of the subjects that arise concerning Harry are serious, such as his relationship with his wife. It is obvious that they have a poor relationship; by the way that Harry describes it. Although his remarks will have an element of bias because he is trying to get the girls up to his hotel room, his comments are the basic truth. We can see this because of the previous play, which shows his wife in her home environment.
We can see that his wife, Lucy, is totally absorbed with looking after her three children, that she has no time for Harry anyway, so in a sense Harry is being neglected, so the audience has mixed feelings about him. He is a middle aged man that is desperately trying to have sex with a young woman, so we feel both think that he is sad, yet have a reserved sense of pity, and through all this seriousness still find the character funny.
From the beginning of the scene it is obvious that Harry is fighting a losing battle, and the comedy comes from the fact that everyone can see this except Harry himself.
As usual in ayckbourns plays, a normal situation is performed to an audience, and highlights the areas in society that, in ayckbourns opinion, are a cause for concern, and uses laughter as a medium to show these areas. In every play, although at first one laughs, there is always a serious message behind each play. This is shown well in the next play I have chosen to study, “A Talk in the Park”.
This play is the last of the five ‘Confusions’ plays and at first involves four characters sat on the four benches. A bird-like man named Arthur sits on the first bench and tries to strike up a conversation with the young woman sat next to him. It is obvious that Arthur is on the look out for company, but the young lady, Beryl, refuses to be drawn into conversation with the man. Arthur continues to talk at quite some length about all his problems, such as all the chores he has to do. Even though he does not have Beryl’s attention, he continues to offload his troubles regardless.
Beryl soon tires of this fellow and moves on to the next bench, where she tries to strike up a conversation with the man sitting there, Charles, but Charles treats her much like she treated Arthur. Charles quickly gets bored of listening to Beryl’s problems, and moves onto another bench where Charles proceeds to pour his problems out on a small middle aged woman, Doreen. She tires of his conversation and moves onto the last bench to relieve her problems by talking to a young man named Ernest. Predictably, he moves on to talk to Arthur, and the cycle continues until all the characters are fed up with each other and all sit sulkily.
Obviously, when performed at the right venue by competent actors, this play is a delight to behold and contains many hysterical comments by each of the different characters. Although the predominant theme is of comedy, a deep underlying sincerity protrudes through the palpable humour.
I think that the message behind this play, or the point that Ayckbourn is trying to make is that of hypocrisy, and how many people have double standards, even though it may not be obvious to them. No one really wants to listen to any one else’s problems, they only want to pour them onto other people.
The last line in the play, “Might as well talk to yourself”, has a lot of significance because it represents the message of the whole play and the themes concerning it. Hypocrisy, ignorance and certain aspects of cynicism are all included during this play, and are all common qualities in humans, however unpleasant they may be.
These qualities are again shown through the medium of comedy, which is both the most enjoyable from the audience’s point of view, and probably most effective for getting the message across. It helps the audience to understand more if they can laugh about the faults that both people in general have and possibly their own.
The common theme that runs throughout all of the five plays in confusions, and indeed most of Ayckbourns plays, is that of laughter and seriousness at the same time. Because of this, the audience thinks about the circumstances and possibly what they would do had they been in the same situation, so it helps them to identify with each character, but laugh also. When viewing the plays, one must consider whether one is at fault to the extent of some of the characters that occur in the plays, and if so how to remedy that relationship.
The plays are written deliberately to stir up many different emotions in each play, and it is through laughter that this is done so well