The Lace Market Theatre presents Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy masterpiece Bedroom Farce all next week. Director Graeme Jennings explains why...

Bedroom Farce was commissioned for the then newly opened National Theatre back in the mid-seventies, and as such it provided the new establishment with its first big hit.

Writing for the first time for such a large stage, Ayckbourn decided that the most practicable way of dealing with such dimensions was to divide it up into smaller rooms.

Since he had already done the kitchen (Absurd Person Singular), the living room, the dining room and the garden (The Norman Conquests), the obvious next move was the bedroom.

He would later tackle the garage (Just Between Ourselves), the hall (Season’s Greetings) and the garden shed (Intimate Exchanges), but in 1975, his razor sharp focus was firmly fixed on the bedroom.

Always alert to the comedic power of three (think of any Englishman, Scotsman, Irishman gag) he decided to divide up the huge Lyttleton stage into three bedrooms all presented simultaneously.

The three bedrooms would be peopled by three, more or less, happy couples and then all that was needed to stir the comic pot was a fourth marvellously maladjusted couple to wreak havoc by descending on each bedroom in turn.

Taking place over the course of a single chaotic night, the play deftly switches back and forth between bedrooms as it performs a comic dissection of the institution of marriage through its varies phases.

Despite the title of the play, and a liberal sprinkling of slapstick throughout, this isn’t a traditional ‘bedroom farce’ at all, but rather a hilarious comedy which relies on beautifully rounded characters for its humour.

In fact all the most predictable elements of bedroom behaviour, namely sex and sleep, are conspicuous by their absence.

Much of the joy of the play comes in the brilliance with which Ayckbourn juxtaposes the action of the four couples in the three bedrooms.

In fact it was this element that drew me to the play and made me so keen to direct it.

I love the way with such assuredness and enviable lightness of touch the play manages to paint a portrait of marriage from its ardent newly-wed beginnings (Malcom and Kate), into its troubled mid-life reappraisals (Jan and Nick) and onto its companionable end (Ernest and Delia), and how all three phases are put to the test by the supremely selfish Trevor and Susannah.

Putting on this play at The Lace Market theatre, which has neither the dimensions or the budget of The National, has been a has been a huge challenge - technically, artistically and practically, but what we lack in size and resources we more than make up for in that one commodity that is the truest meaning of the word ‘amateur’ – and that is love.

More than anything working on this production has been huge fun.

The end result is something of which I am immensely proud, the tickets are going fast, but if you can bag yourself one before they all disappear, and you like a play that could seriously endanger your chuckle bone, then do come and see what we have to offer.

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