![Awkward encounter: Josh takes his girlfriend Sara back in time to meet his parents](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2023/05/17/TELEMMGLPICT000335217782_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Welcome to the Family: Alan Ayckbourn goes sci-fi for his 88th play
This intriguing story about a couple who go back in time via a not-so-virtual reality game to meet the parents could have taken more risks
![Awkward encounter: Josh takes his girlfriend Sara back in time to meet his parents](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2023/05/17/TELEMMGLPICT000335217782_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Alan Ayckbourn – who, admirably, continues to write and direct at the age of 84 – tends to release his plays on the world via the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. However, he has, of late, become something of a champion of The Old Laundry Theatre in Bowness.
Last year he premiered his 86th play, All Lies, at the little playhouse by Lake Windermere. Now he is directing his 88th full-length stage drama, Meet the Family, at the same venue.
The latest piece is set in a somewhat dystopian near future in which a decidedly cavalier computer technology company has created a not-so-virtual reality game called “captures”. The technology “captures” a place and time in the past for a specified number of hours, allowing the “players” to, for example, visit dead relatives at a chosen point in their lives.
In the play we meet Josh (the loving son of deceased aristocrats) and Sara (his working-class girlfriend) as, adorned in the uniforms of Josh’s private school, they prepare to go back in time to meet his parents. All has been well, it seems, on the 43 previous occasions that Josh has visited his folks by way of “capture”, but now, with Sara in the mix, a legion of skeletons falls out of the family closet.
The sci-fi premise of the piece might make it seem like Ayckbourn is bounding with alacrity from his artistic moorings. In truth, the hi-tech futurism of the story notwithstanding, the work is a very conventional comedy of manners combined with a familiar drawing room play.
In the first act Josh and Sara become bogged down in autobiographical explication that is irritatingly implausible, given that they, apparently, know each other well enough to be on the brink of marriage. More problematic still is Ayckbourn’s apparent inability to keep a secret.
There is also a rather formulaic approach to dramatic structure, with Act One containing a number of signposts to important plot twists later in the play, not least a major one concerning Josh’s louche uncle, and “capture” technology pioneer, Lance. This is all the more frustrating because, as the colourful back stories of Josh’s parents (Sir Peter and Lady Vivica Meizner) are painted in, the drama boasts some very wry observations. There are universally strong performances, too, from the five-strong cast.
Tanya-Loretta Dee is appropriately astonished as Sara, the only regular person in the play. Bill Champion’s Lance is suitably rakish, as a self-styled “sexual rescue service” for middle-aged, married women. An intriguing, sometimes rewarding piece, then, but not classic Ayckbourn.
Until May 27, Tickets: 015394 40872; oldlaundrytheatre.co.uk