Earth Angel ★★★

There are few British playwrights who have such a global influence as Alan Ayckbourn. He’s the most performed English-language dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. He once had five plays running in the West End at the same time. He has been lauded on both sides of the Atlantic with Tony and Olivier awards. A trailblazer for ‘theatre in the round’, this autumn sees the 86-year-old Ayckbourn delivering his annual play in the Stephen Joseph Theatre calendar – his 91st – Earth Angel.

The premise is that Gerald Mallett (Russell Richardson), having just lost his beloved wife Amy, finds unexpected and unknown moral support from Daniel (Iskander Eaton), someone who seems on inspection to have little or no connection to the deceased wife or indeed her widower husband. Immediately his kindness and care for Gerald comes under suspicion from his well-meaning but intrusive neighbour Norah (Elizabeth Boag), which resonates outwards to their technology-addicted mutual neighbour Hugo (Hayden Wood), which then escalates to Gerald’s magistrate sister Maxine (Liza Goddard) and her retired policeman husband Adrian (Stuart Fox). Suddenly, Daniel’s kindness is reframed as the potential work of either a conman or a serial killer. How can anyone trust the kindness of strangers?

Ayckbourn’s script cogitates, at first, upon that hinterland of what happens in the immediacy of grief – when people have done their duty and paid their respects at a funeral and a wake – when someone is left with the ache of grief and a snapshot of memories. There is a play to explore the vulnerability of that particular state – but Earth Angel is not it. While the play still ruminates effectively on loss, grief and memories, it diverts too often ineffectually to bemoan that which is “typical of the times we are living in”.

The nature of life seen through modern technology – whether the internet or social media – is delivered far from surefootedly. The idea of how someone’s reputation can be traduced according to the flimsiest “internet research”, which some people in turn act upon without even reading, piled upon with “some chatter online about him”, is a juicy topic, but it withers on the vine in service of some weak laughs about zombies and hashtags. You feel for Hayden Wood trying to make any mileage from the leaden, repetitive screen-addiction ‘joke’ that is so superficial, it barely merits being mentioned once.

Similarly, the echo chamber of the internet, amplifying the narrative on pushing how people are perceived, is upended by a baffling rant by Gerald’s unpleasant and unearned rant of how his sister is “a bigoted, racist, class-conscious snob”. It comes out of nowhere and feels wildly disproportionate to the character we are shown on stage. Did we skip a scene?

The actors deliver a professional gloss on a script that feels like an early draft rather than the finished product. Russell Richardson is rock solid as Gerald. He plays the notes of grief and selfishness and vulnerability with skill and nuance. Iskander Eaton, with the trickier role of the character who is the totemic mystery of Earth Angel, gifts the production with an openness, almost a blankness, that allows others to ascribe motives to his tabula rasa. Liza Goddard has a presence way beyond what the script requires her to do. She adds dimensions to a character that is merely a conduit for some ill-defined notions about social justice or the lack thereof.

As always, Ayckbourn is painfully aware of the times in which we live. And the core question of Earth Angel – how do you take someone at their word in this day and age – is a valid one. Frustratingly, the ideas that underpin this social drama never quite coalesce into a satisfying whole on this occasion.