CONFUSIONS

A student edition of five one-act plays by Britain's most popular playwright.

Ayckbourn's series of plays for 4-5 actors typify his black comedies
of human behaviour. The plays are alternately naturalistic, stylised
and farcical, but underlying each is the problem of loneliness. The
Mother Figure shows a mother unable to escape from baby talk; in The
Drinking Companion an absentee husband attempts seduction without
success; in Between Mouthfuls, a waiter oversees a fraught dinner
encounter. A garden party gets out of hand in Gosforth's Fete whilst A
Talk in the Park is a revue style curtain call piece for the five
actors.

Whether the comedies concern marital conflict,
infidelity or motherhood and take place on a park bench or at a village
fete, the characters are familiar and their cries for help instantly
recognisable.

"Principally he is respected as a radical re-inventor of form" Dominic Dromgoole