Covered in ink after a disastrous day in the print shop after one after another of Rosie's vital parts had failed I found the boiler had packed in and Connie telling me that I had ten minutes to get ready to see Rosehill Players perform Alan Ayckbourn's farce, "Absurd Person Singular". I will not reproduce my language on receiving this information, but half an hour later I was laughing uproariously at Eva's desperate medley of failed suicide attempts, and life came back into focus.
Ripping the mask off human cruelty is made viciously funny in Marion Fox's inspired production of Ayckbourn's masterpiece. Set on three successive Christmas Eves, it exposes the mania of small minded people to keep up appearances to the extent of shutting themslves off completely from other people's anguish. Desperate to impress his important friends, small business Sidney (Ben Ramsbottom) drives his obsessively housepride wife, Jane (Melinda McNicholas) into agonies of remorse for forgetting the tonic water, and then leaves her out in the pouring rain because it would not do to let the Brewster-Wrights see the state she was in. In a merry-go-round of rising and falling fortunes it presents devastating a view of human nature, "who rises and who falls, who's in, who's out", but makes us laugh at it.
Obsessed with women's bums, cocky bastard Geoffrey (Brian Goulding) brags of his way of getting them where he wants them, and on Christmas Eve tells Eva, hanging on to sanity by a diet of tablets, that he is leaving her for another woman. Thelma Atherton's entirely mute performance in the second act is a comic masterpiece which I have rarely seen matched on the amateur stage. With down-turned mouth, the saddest of sad-faced clowns, she sees with despair one after another of her suicide plans fail ridiculously, until she finally breaks silence to sing "On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me" and bring the deranged company together in a chorus that is so funny and so tragic that it is unbearable. It holds up the mirror to funny and tragic Christmases in millions of households.
It is Eva who has the wisdom to see all her fellow sufferers with understanding, most of all the deflated and incompetent Geoffrey who now needs her strength to sort out his ruinous business affairs. The prestigious Brewster-Wrights of the first act are now shivering in an unheated flat. Crumpled in an armchair, Wadvern Davies exposes Ronald as a man in denial of his wife's alcoholism. As haughty as Lady Catherine de Burgh in the first act, Vanessa Cowley movingly shows Marion yielding to Eva's compassion. The play reaches its climax with a hilarious game of forfeits that reveals it is OK to be a lunatic provided that you have the wit to realise it.
When I got up this morning there had been a power cut and that had repaired our boiler. I wonder whether Rosie has had the wit to fix her dodgy jogger?

Peter Watson