Review
Published: Wednesday 03 February, 2010 by Sarah Ditum, Venue Magazine
Next Stage Theatre Company knows that a good birthday party needs more than cake and balloons. For the fifth anniversary of their move to The Mission Theatre, they offer a bit of infidelity, some crushing revelations, epic social humiliation and a couple of untimely deaths - all provided by patron Alan Ayckbourn's script. Three couples (parents, their two sons and their partners) and a team of clowning waiters assemble in a restaurant for matriarch Laura's 54th. Secrets and dissatisfactions begin to spill out before the coffee's been served, and when the party breaks up the three couples are spun through time in different directions: one pair going back to their first encounter, another heading into a fractious future, and the third remaining in the birthday present. It's a potentially tricksy structure that works, mostly because the cast play it briskly - keeping the script's wit and and farce high even while their characters are going through some grim times (Kay Francksen is especially good as the brittle Laura, and Liz Wilson is sweetly sympathetic as she takes her downtrodden wife part from doormathood to mild assertiveness). Next Stage fit very nicely at The Mission: hopefully, they'll be blowing out candles there for many more birthdays to come.
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