Is changing your life bad?

Theatre
If I Were You
Manoel Theatre

How many times have we wondered what the humdrum of our daily life would be like for someone else?

Especially if that someone happens to be a person who usually takes us for granted and downplays the importance of what we do.

Alan Ayckbourn explores this idea in one of the most tried and tested “suspension of disbelief” functions of narrative: the Body Swap.

From Disney’s three versions of Freaky Friday and this year’s The Change Up to several episodes of Charmed, Star Trek and last week’s Misfits on ITV, the body swap has been exploited to varying degrees since it was first cooked up in 1882 by F. Anstey in his book, Vice Versa.

Mr Ayckbourn’s offering, If I Were You, written in 2006, follows his earlier use of body swaps – Body Language and The Jollies.

This particular attempt, staged by Maleth Theatre Company, was rather weak as a script because the premise for the body swap was practically non-existent.

Husband and wife, Mal and Jill Rodale, played by Peter Galea and Jane Pillow respectively, spend the first act forging ahead with their lives – with Mal a self-important furniture showroom manager and Jill his patient long-suffering wife.

They deal with their colleagues and family – school-age son Sam, played by Isaac Cutajar, married daughter Chrissie (Kate Decesare) and her husband, Dean (Sean Briffa), who also works with Mal at the showroom – BFRS Furniture.

The second act sees them wake up to the usual routine, only to find themselves in each other’s body and realising they had to appear normal to the rest of the world and make the most of it by attempting to lead each other’s lives.

Their different personalities naturally clash with those of the body they’re impersonating, leading Mal to appear as though he has softened and Jill to come across as a stronger woman – while the “original” characters become more in touch with their spouse’s point of view. The set was a very clever combination of three rooms on different levels – the Rodale’s bedroom, kitchen and sitting room.

Ingenious use of projections on the windows of the bedroom and kitchen transformed the house into the BFRS showroom by simply swapping a suburban scene with the shop’s bold name and promotional offers – turning them into display units.

It marginally made up for the weak pacing in the first act which dragged the development of the plot to a very slow plod, when it could have done with much better timing. This, I found was the production’s biggest failing: it detracted from the actor’s individual performances because they seemed to lack energy.

Director Salvu Mallia seemed to have a good idea of how to present the staging but could have done with pushing for clearer and more convincing character interaction on stage.

Isaac Cutajar, was the most consistent character when it came to engaging the audience – he gave his interpretation the awkwardness a teenager’s relationship with his parents should have.

Mr Galea and Ms Pillow, the two main characters, picked up the pace in a much stronger second act and finally brought Mal and Jill to the audience’s attention as a husband and wife growing to understand each other, finally getting some of the comic timing needed.

Ms Decesare’s meek Chrissie was not particularly memorable – possibly because the character was written this way, in which case Ms Decesare made the most of her rather weak lines.

Meanwhile, Sean Briffa’s Dean came across as falsely pompous in his role as the domineering and condescending Dean – who treats Chrissie rather badly and ends up getting socked on the nose by an indignant Mal in the guise of Jill, towards the end of the play.

He did, however, breach the audience-actor divide effectively at certain points as a great parody of a mean little man and is to be commended for it.

If I Were You was, on the whole, an uneven performance with plenty of unlocked potential which could have been drawn out by stronger directorial choices and a deeper understanding on the actors’ part of what each character treatment required.