Everyone hates New Year’s Eve, don’t they? The one night of the year when you are expected to go out and have fun is inevitably the night you find yourself stuck in a bar you wouldn’t normally go to having to fork out for an expensive set menu, with no one to kiss at midnight and a double-price cab fare to take you into the New Year. Or maybe that’s just me.
So retreating to the country with a bunch of mates is a happy alternative, or so thought Kate, the protagonist in Michael Wynne’s new comedy The Priory at the Royal Court. Having had the year from hell, Kate has invited a few friends from London to an old priory in the countryside, where she hopes to have a low-key gathering to see in 2010. But her plans go awry, of course, when long-festering resentments, issues and emotions within the group come to the fore, precipitated by a few unexpected guests.
Perhaps it is partly because Jessica Hynes, who plays Kate, embodied a similarly downtrodden, unhappy character in The Norman Conquests recently that The Priory has a touch of Alan Ayckbourn about it. As with Ayckbourn, Wynne’s play is an analysis of people, with all our neuroses and anxieties. With lashings of bittersweet comedy and a touch of farce, Wynne shows how this group of outwardly successful thirtysomethings so successfully manage to undermine their own abilities and achievements with a catalogue of emotional issues.
The characters he depicts are those we all recognise: Ben, the iPhone addict whose mid-30s crisis has led him to get engaged to a girl he barely knows; Carl and Rebecca, whose high-achieving path through career, marriage and children is not as successful as it appears; Daniel, the lonely heart in therapy who has turned to the internet to fall in love only to find a one-night stand; and Kate, who, at 36, is facing up to the prospect that life is not turning out quite how she envisaged it. All of them show how difficult it is to pick a path through your 20s and 30s, trying to have it all – love, career, family, friends – whilst usually failing on at least one count.
These are not subtle characterisations, but there is always an element of truth in a cliché and Wynne does root his creations in reality; that is, until the rather surprising denouement when Charlotte Riley’s Essex girl Laura puts a firm end to the New Year’s Eve commiserations.
This is a light, funny and entertaining play to watch, but there is one problem: it doesn’t exactly make me want to rush off to the country this New Year’s Eve. I suppose there’s always that overpriced bar…
CB