Confusions - Five Interlinked One-act Plays - STUDENT EDITION

Ayckbourn's series of plays for 4-5 actors typify his black comedies of human behaviour. The plays are alternately naturalistic, stylised and farcical, but underlying each is the problem of loneliness

The Mother Figure shows a mother unable to escape from baby talk; in The Drinking Companion an absentee husband attempts seduction without success; in Between Mouthfuls, a waiter oversees a fraught dinner encounter

A garden party gets out of hand in Gosforth's Fete whilst A Talk in the Park is a revue style curtain call piece for the five actors

Whether the comedies concern marital conflict, infidelity or motherhood and take place on a park bench or at a village fete, the characters are familiar and their cries for help instantly recognisable

"Principally he is respected as a radical re-inventor of form" ~ Dominic Dromgoole