Ten Times Table at Richmond Theatre was good light entertainment

These days I have to have a good reason not to see something at Richmond Theatre and a play by Alan Ayckbourn is more of an attraction than a deterrent so Ten Times Table was a no-brainer.

The first night discount available with my ATG card meant going on a Monday, not a regular theatre night for me, and it also meant paying just £17 for my usual seat Dress Circle A25.

The story of Ten Times Table is fairly simple, a committee charged with organising a folk festival splits into two violently opposed camps as they rein-act a local historical event. It is class war laid bare.

The comedy comes from the cast of characters each of which has a defining feature from pedantry to nervousness. There was no subtlety behind their exaggerated veneers.

The actors each made the most of what they had to work with and I particularly admired Roberts Daws as the perpetually worried chairman who lost control of the situation and knew it.

The mix of a simple story and simple characters makes it sound like a 1970s ITV sit-com and that is exactly what it felt like to me.

Ten Times Table was funny, and at times it even made me laugh, but it was insubstantial humour with no intelligence behind it. This is not Relatively Speaking which I loved (twice). It was worth the £17 I paid to see it but not a great deal more than that.

Relatively Speaking at Richmond Theatre was very funny

I was reluctant to see Relatively Speaking for several reasons; I had seen it not that long ago (June 2013), my diary was rammed and while Ayckbourn plays are funny they are not challenging.

On the other hand, it was on at Richmond (one of my regular theatres), it starred Robert Powell and I knew that it was funny.

In the end that fine balance was swayed by a ticket offer (band A seat for the price of band B) and me having a free evening on a Monday, not normally a theatre day. That was enough for me to go for seat B25 in the Dress Circle for £28.50. A good seat at a good price.

One reason that I was going to Richmond so often was because I was working in Teddington and the helpful 33 bus had me in Richmond by 6:20pm despite me not leaving the office until just before 6pm. I got off at Cresswell Road to enjoy the walk over the bridge. I took a slight detour to walk along the river, past the White Cross, to enjoy those views too. The tide had recently slipped away leaving a damp muddy stain, a profound reminder of its reach.

I had still not found somewhere decent to eat regularly pre-theatre so I went to one of my usual places, The Prince's Head, where I sat at my usual table, drank my usual beer (Oliver's Island) and ate one of my usual meals (Halloumi burger). Not very exciting but it did the job.

The humour in Relatively Speaking, and there was an awful lot of it, came from misunderstandings of the relationships between the two couples that built on each other to make a complicated situation complex.

The first mistake was when the young man thought that his girlfriend was going to visit her parents in the country when she was actually visiting her boss. Most of the action took place in the garden of the older couple's impressive house.

As people's understanding changed of either the true situation or of the role that they were meant to be playing so the actors had to change mood frequently, almost mid-sentence, and they all did so splendidly. It was no surprise that Robert Powell shone as the older man and the rest of the cast were excellent too, including Liza Goddard as his wife. Shamefully the ATG website does not name the actors playing the young couple. The chemistry between the four of them was just right.

Of course the other big name involved was Alan Ayckbourn who knows how to write a comedy. After a minute or two of scene setting we were plunged into the maelstrom of misunderstandings and the laughter came loud and often. It was possibly even funnier the second time around.

Relatively Speaking was very funny and a great way to start the week.

Relatively Speaking at Wyndham's Theatre (very funny)

I love the theatre but generally find West End prices not justified by the performances so I am grateful to be able to go to some of the shows that appeal through work's social club where I can get discounted tickets.

And so I found myself in one of the front rows of the stalls for a revival of Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking, which in 1967 was his first hit.

The play's premise is simple but quickly opens up the way to much confusion and complexity.

The young woman is the only person who knows what is going on. Her current boy friend wants to marry her but first she has to clear an older married man out of her life. She heads to his house in the commuter belt telling her boyfriend that she is off to see her parents. He follows, manages to get there first and the confusion begins.

Along the way this includes the husband thinking that the young man is his wife's lover and the young man thinking that the wife has disowned his girlfriend because she was illegitimate.

It gets much more complicated than that and every line either twists the situation unexpectedly or produces a laugh-out-loud punchline.

The acting was wonderful and all four characters were utterly delightful. A lot of the comedy rode on the young man's innocence of the situation and he carried his naivety brilliantly.The young woman was reassured and in control while the older man was confused and on the verge of loosing it. The one known star, Felicity Kendall, was calm among the chaos and did not let all the supposed and suspected relationships get in the way of her orderly Sunday in the garden.

Alan Ayckbourn's plays entertain through humour and this one was an undoubted success with the audience, myself included, laughing uncontrollably throughout. This is a good solid farce that is well crafted and well delivered.

Haunting Julia at the Riverside

Haunting Julia has been getting some good reviews, the Riverside Studios is an easy bus ride away and I had a free evening so I gave it a go. And it really is good.

My initial reluctance to see it was because it is by Alan Ayckbourn and while I've generally enjoyed the few plays of his that I have seen (most recently Taking Steps at the Orange Tree Theatre) they have been entertaining rather than gripping.

Haunting Julia promised something a little different, a scary ghost story with the Julia in the story having been dead for twelve years.

The play takes place in one room. The room where Julia killed herself as a student of music and a successful composer and which has now been turned in to a shrine to Julia as part of cultural centre built by her father, Joe (Christopher Timothy) in her memory.

The room is about to be opened to the public but before it is Joe invites Julia's former boyfriend, who found her body, to see the memorial. They are then joined by a psychic who had contacted Joe to say that he had something to tell him about Julia.

Julia may be there too as there are unexplained noises on a new tape that Joe believes are her.

Joe explains that he had brought them all there as he had unanswered questions about her apparent suicide, like was it really suicide and, if so, why had she done it.

As the three men talk about Julia we learn a lot more about her but also about each of them, all of which turns out to be important.

The psychic leads us in to some suspense filled moments and there is one really dramatic moment in the first half when everybody in the audience jumped a long way.

There's a short break but I presume that's just to allow the actors to rest and us to spend money as the second half starts exactly where the first finished off and the continues in the same mood.

I'll not spoil it by saying anything further about the plot.

You are always aware that this is an Ayckbourn play by the crisp humorous dialogue that trundles along nicely and hold the play together.

The characters grow on us too as we learn more about them. They are three very different people, with different views on Julia, and these differences spark tensions and keep the dialogue vibrant. All three actors played their part wonderfully and were instrumental in the success of the play.

The story of the play is a gradual reveal of Julia and her life and in the end all the questions are answered to bring the play to a satisfactory and warmly received ending.

Haunting Julia was a fantastic evening in every aspect and is another example of why the smaller London theatres are so vibrant and interesting at the moment.

Taking Steps at the Orange Tree Theatre

Alan Ayckbourn's Taking Steps makes a welcome return to the Orange Tree Theatre under his own direction.

This is farce in its basic form with a small group of characters interwoven in each other's lives with increasing complexity and confusion to produce genuine laugh-out-loud moments throughout.

The steps that are being taken are those of a new bride leaving her husband but getting in the way of this are her brother, the woman who left him at the alter, the man who owns the house the husband wants to buy, the lawyer from out of town who has come to help with the deal and the ghost of a prostitute.

The plot complications include the return of brother's former fiancée (and the different expectations from this), ghostly noises from old plumbing, and mistakes made with sleeping pills and with the interpretation of notes.

All this happens in a large three story house that is cleverly laid out on one stage.

Here the bed and dressing table (far left) are in the master bedroom on the first floor and the two easy chairs are in the lounge on the ground floor. The little attic room is just off to the left. The (flat) stairs are on two sides of the stage (to the right and ahead).

This imaginative setting introduces its own comedy elements. For example, we can see the wife doing her dancing exercises in the bedroom while the people in the room below look up to see where the noise is coming from when, in real life, they are standing next to her.

This may sound confusing but you quickly get the idea of how it works and it all seems natural after that. Alan Ayckbourn's direction really succeeds here.

The small cast is engaging and (mostly) believable, the hard-working and hard-drinking rich husband particularly so. I also enjoyed the timid ex-fiancee and the incompetent lawyer.

The rich humour came from both the dialogue and, being a farce, characters not being aware of situations that we could all see, e.g. the girl hiding in the attic or the wife trying to sneak down the stairs.

There was a story too and that provided a place-holder for the humour for most of the two hours and twenty minutes before giving up and letting the farce do the work. There was an ending of sorts, or rather several endings as there was a big change for each character. Some of those endings were happy and some less so but they seemed to be more a way to bring the play to a close than to complete the story.

But the lack of a strong or believable story did little or nothing to detract from a play that simply did not need one to be funny. And Taking Steps was very funny.

Bedroom Farce at the Rose Theatre

I've not found the programme at the newish Rose Theatre in Kingston that inviting and so, while I go to the Orange Tree in Richmond regularly, I only made my first visit to the Rose recently.

What finally pulled me in was Bedroom Farce by Alan Ayckbourn who, experience tells me, knows how to be funny.

The surprising initial problem was booking the tickets online with a website that would have felt out of date five years ago. The main problems are that you cannot see which seats you are buying and you have to go right back to the start of the purchase transaction every time you want to look at other options.

The Rose is an oddly shaped theatre due to it being some spare space left to the Council within a block of expensive flats and turning it into a theatre was an after-thought.

As a result the stage protrudes into the auditorium which is not very deep but is high. For some reason there is a pit area at the front with no fixed seating, you are encouraged to bring your own cushion!

My seat on the far left side offered a good view across the stage and of the auditorium.

The play was not what I expected in that it was a comedy but not a farce; no trouser-less men hiding in wardrobes here. The bedroom bit of the title was true though and all the action took place in three bedrooms that were alongside each other on the stage.

There was not much of a plot but there was a lot of humorous dialogue that kept things moving along at a sprightly pace but without reaching the anticipated climax. In the end the lack of a plot, some under-par acting and the nature of the theatre itself left the feeling that a reasonable evening out could, and should, have been much better.

It's going to take something quite special to drag me back to the Rose but I will keep my eyes open for that special thing and am prepared to give the Rose another chance one day.