House and Garden
Austin Playhouse, through Feb. 19
A man’s home is his castle, so they say. But when that castle is bombarded with buffoonish characters while the man splits his house with his wife and its landscape with his mist resses, then it’s safe to say all bets are off. House and Garden, Alan Ayckbourn’s coupled comedies performed in tandem by a single cast, are really one show divided between two stages. Austin Playhouse has arranged the pair with House, directed by Don Toner, playing on its main stage, while Garden, directed by Lara Toner, runs simultaneously on its cabaret-sized second stage.
Both plays revolve around Trish and Teddy Platt, who live on a country estate close to London with their daughter Sally. While the wife snubs her husband in House, he goes gallivanting in Garden with Joanna, the wife of his neighbor Giles. Teddy is expecting an old chum, Gavin Ryng-Mayne, to offer him a political position during a luncheon, which happens to be taking place on the same day as the garden fete being presented by an obscure French actress to whom Teddy takes a shine. If that weren’t enough to distract you, perhaps the subplots between their kids, the housekeepers, and the event coordinators will. For some farces, a madhouse is anticipated and welcome. For a farce dealt between stages, it’s showing off, as if Ayckbourn were playing a nasty card trick in which one hand has a full house while you know his other hand has a straight flush.
Through this imposed juxtaposition, we do gain perspective on the characters according to how often or how little we see them. The heart is in House, a far more sophisticated piece, with pranks sparked by miscommunication, two people talking at the same time, people ignoring Teddy, and Teddy talking when no one is there. The actors exit to and fro with the convenience of practically never having to change out of character.
Aside from the hired help’s clowning and the unintelligible French (even by fluent standards), Austin Playhouse’s company does not fail in developing some broad characters.
Joanna, played with vulnerability by (the only English filly) Bernadette Nason, goes from peaceable to absolutely bonkers in Garden, which is not really Joanna’s play in the way that House is Trish’s play. Babs George’s Trish is better than just an updated forsaken Nora Helmer, with more sense and poise as a headstrong wife. She is the show champion, proclaiming that she refuses to “go down with the ship” of past ill-fated wives in the Platt family.
Witnessing two endings certainly did satisfy all the loose ends. We find out what happens to Trish, and finally in the extension we find out what really happens to everyone else. If they were both performed back-to-back on the same stage, it would surely be a four-hour show. The best bits, of course, are in House, so if they showed Garden second, the audience might not come back.
This article appears in January 27 • 2006.