Theatre Review: Season’s Greetings by Alan Ayckbourn at the National Theatre

by Sarah Cope `

The first thing to say about Season’s Greetings is that if you have tickets for it already, try to get a refund. If a friend offers to take you to see it, risk the friendship and tell them you would ather gouge your eyes out with a skewer. It really is that bad. Actually, it’s worse.

You may have read the excellent reviews and wonder why I am being so harsh. But let’s look at one of the reviews. The Daily Mail has said it is “a cracker of a production”. In that crackers are full of crap nobody is interested in and terrible jokes, I’d say that was spot on.

Here we have a tired, dated Alan Ayckbourn play, set in the Seventies, though you might not guess it from some of the clothes and shoes (if they can’t even get that right, you know you’re in for a bad evening). It’s set at Christmas, so let’s put it on at Christmas, with some well-known cast members and a lot of sparkly publicity.

All you need to know is that this is a bad family Christmas. As one of my companions pointed out “most people have already been through that – why would you want to pay good money to go through it again?” Quite.

Catherine Tate as the neglected Belinda is possibly the highlight, but that’s not saying much. Katherine Parkinson (from Channel 4’s The I.T Crowd) as the heavily pregnant Pattie is such a moaning minnie it is tempting to cover your ears with your hands whenever she ventures on stage. Parkinson does in fact have a voice that sounds like she’s either about to cry or is in terrible agony – possibly both.

As is usually the case, the most incisive theatrical commentary was to be found in the queue for the ladies loo during the interval. One well-to-do woman said to another, “I could really do without that ‘Del Boy’ character!”, by which she meant Neil Stuke’s Neville, a loathsome, swaggering bully who one could only hope would be electrocuted by the Christmas tree lights.

In fact, I would happily have seen all nine characters end their days this way. The play could certainly have dispensed with three or four of them altogether as they added nothing to the plot – and we could have all gone home sooner. A very strange element was that despite the relatively large cast, the action was essentially a succession of (boring, pointless, unfunny) two-handers – different combinations of two characters talking in the hall, or the lounge, or the dining room – of what was, of course, an utterly bland set.

If you do have a ticket and feel obliged to go along, cheer up – you might get the ‘flu.

Season’s Greetings has an extended run until the end of March.