Salutary metamorphosis

If I were you (Maleth at the Manoel Theatre) is not one of Alan Ayckbourn’s best comedies, but it is reasonably amusing.

Jill (Jane Pillow)’s delight when she understands the reason for Sam’s keenness on the school play is beautifully done- Paul Xuereb

It shows the playwright dealing with his favourite theme, that of marriage as a dysfunctional institution, in a disillusioned fashion.

Ayckbourn is trying yet again to provide a new take on comedic realism, though this time the device he resorts to, that of characters who find themselves inhabiting other character’s bodies, had already been used a few times in films before this comedy was written in 2006.

The main characters, Jill and Mal, have been married for over 20 years, and the life and joy have long gone out of the relationship.

Mal is a chauvinist who rides roughshod over the aspirations of his wife and of his teenage son Sam, and shows affection solely for his daughter Chrissie, married to Dean, who has provided him with a grandson; a granddaughter would have been no good for him. He has also had for some time an affair with a younger woman.

Jill’s personality has been debilitated by her confinement to housework, having been prevented by Mal from finding a job outside the house as she so much desires.

Mal does not know she knows about his affair, a knowledge that humiliates her, but she is unable to leave him partly because she has never stopped loving him completely.

She tries to encourage Sam who wishes to act in his school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whereas Mal thinks of acting as a pansy activity and speaks disgustedly about actors wearing tights in Shakespearean roles.

In the first act Jill also discovers that Chrissy is not as happy in her marriage as she thought, and suspects there are times when Dean hits her daughter.

This act has been described by one British critic as one of the blackest comedy acts Ayckbourn has written, and indeed the emphasis throughout is on Mal’s bullying of his family, his hectoring of the staff in his firm, and his conscience-free relations with his other woman, on the one hand, and the sheer unhappiness of Jill on the other.

It ends, however, with the crucial transformation. During the night Mal becomes Jill in his emotions and tastes, but not physically, while Jill is appalled to find she has become her husband and is terrified to think she will have to run his firm as well as the house, but the two agree Mal should still go to the office while Jill remains at home.

Ayckbourn handles the situation very cleverly. While Jill has become Mal in some respects, she has retained some of her female personality.

So, for instance, when now she discusses Mal’s extramarital affair with Chrissy, she speaks with a certain embarrassment; she has now become an adulterer who is conscious of being perhaps in the wrong.

Mal/Jill, on the other hand, seems to be more comfortable with his new feminine personality. The new Mal does something even more important; on the phone to his mistress he tells her he is terrified of the violent way his wife is behaving – she he has just knocked Dean to the floor on confirming her suspicion that he has been ill treating Jill when in his cups – and ditches her for good.

Jill/Mal has been greatly puzzling Chrissie and Sam by her/his behaviour at home, but when Sam, in one of the comedy’s funniest scenes, comes to rehearse his few lines as Flute the bellows-mender in the Dream with the person he thinks to be his mother, he discloses to her/him that he wanted to be so much in the play not, as Mal had thought, because he wanted to be with cissy-boys but because he had a crush on his young female teacher.

So that’s all right by the chauvinist father. Jill/Mal’s punching of Dean is another important scene, for not only does it lead to the end of Mal’s affair with his mistress, but it cuts Dean down to size in front of Chrissie’s eyes.

The play ends with another bedroom scene in which Mal and Jill revert to their proper bodies. It was a pity that Peter Gale and Jane Pillow, who play the two roles, are lying flat on the bed, their faces invisible to much of the audience, and their lines incomprehensible even in row E where I was sitting. As the lines lead to the couple’s beginning to make love as they have not done for years, it was irritating that this should have been allowed to happen.

I ended up thinking, how long will it take for the salutary effects of the metamorphosis to wear off?

Ayckbourn, a specialist in stage design, asks for the stage to be divided in three sections – bedroom, kitchen and living-room, while all three areas double as Mal’s office. Changes are indicated by lighting, but also, very cleverly, by swiftly changing the views seen through the house’s windows to large notices regarding the firm and back again.

Because of the narrowness of the Manoel stage, Salvu Mallia, who directs, uses a front stage over what is normally the orchestra pit to serve as the living-room.

Mallia’s cast is a good one, but needs to work more on essential things like comic timing and voice control. Peter Galea, for instance, uses a consistently loud and harsh voice in act one and switches to a very subdued voice as Jill, as if he were under sedation. He needs a more normal voice in act one, and a stronger one in the second act.

The essential character, however, is there in both acts, and he is particularly successful in his house-wifely scenes in act two. Jane Pillow’s Jill is a broken woman in act one and needs to have moments where the personality Mal has nearly destroyed shows it is still alive, but she shows much subtlety in the second act depicting the clashes between her two personalities.

Her delight when she understands the reason for Sam’s keenness on the school play, and her dismay when she has just knocked Dean down, are beautifully done.

Sean Briffa’s Dean is cocky and happy to bask in Mal’s approval, and Kate DeCesare is a young wife who accepts Dean’s occasional blows as a normal event in married life.

What, we may feel, will she think in five years’ time? Isaac Cutajar’s Sam is good in his indignant reactions to Mal’s unreasonable behaviour and is a true schoolboy actor as he recites Thisbe’s lines to the dead Pyramus from the play within the play in The Dream.