Middle Age Spread at Sky City Theatre

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The horror began before the play did. Having decided to dine at Sky City before seeing a play about six middle-aged, middle-class people stuck in a 70s dinner party from hell, the waiter picked us for people about to see the play.

Well, of course we were. Who else goes to the theatre (and more particularly, Roger Hall at the theatre) but the middle-aged, middle classes?

Here is Reg, in his polyester flares and side burns spitting out his contempt for the middle classes. He is a philandering lecturer at the training college, as middle class as they come.

The fondue is, says the terrible Reg, played to great, hollow sneering effect by Stuart Devenie, symbolic of life. "Everyone jabbing away for the best bits." His ghastly wife, Isobel (Catherine Wilkin) the spinner and weaver, in her cottage industry clothes says, "If it weren't for the middle classes there would be no culture at all."

It is the horror of self-recognition that makes Middle Age Spread - 26 years after its first production - such a clever play. You can watch it and weep. Or watch it and laugh at how your life in the suburbs might look if the front of your house was unlatched like a giant dolls' house and the world could peer in.

John Parker's set for this Auckland Theatre Company production resembles such a dolls' house. Like dolls in such a house the characters appear slightly too large for the trappings of middle-classness: the wall-to-wall carpet in the loo, the art books, the infidelity that lurks beneath the nice bedroom suite with the his and hers bedside tables. Be careful what you aspire to.

Elizabeth, a housewife, is married to Colin, a deputy principal who is supposed to aspire to the newly vacant position of principal. Elizabeth (Geraldine Brophy) wears boho smocks which are but a shudder away from the osti frock. Colin (Greg Johnson) wears his wide striped ties in shades of brown and beige; his sad raincoat like a shroud.

He still thinks of himself as a "young man of promise". Greg Johnson's Colin is a triumph of a character broken but still dreaming. Huddled within Colin is a good man shrivelled by diminished expectation. His great ambition is reduced to the hope that one day he will own a raincoat he is not ashamed of.

Great play; fiendishly difficult to stage. It moves backwards and forwards in time, returning to the present, where the past is played out, by means of the dinner party.

Director Colin McColl chooses to tell us where we are up to in the script by means of screens which remind us that we are, for example, now watching a scene which took place 10 weeks earlier. You can see the difficulties, but it seems a clumsy device: it slows things down.

This Middle Age Spread is fine as an entertainment. The laughs, and the shudders of self-recognition, have not been diluted down the years. But what is lacking is the bleakness which should illuminate the comedy.

There are moments, and they come from Devenie and Johnson, both brilliantly wretched. But the women seem to be playing in a farce; the men a tragedy. Seldom do the twain meet.