If this year’s freshers’ show, Confusions (five one-act plays by Alan Ayckbourn) was judged solely on its acting talent, it would deserve very high praise indeed. Almost the entire cast gave funny and entertaining performances, with many showing promise for future roles in productions at Cambridge. But I was left puzzled by the choice of a 40-year-old play that unfortunately showed its age, and on this night at least, didn’t quite connect with its audience.

There was a good range of comic and naturalistic acting across the five short plays. Sasha Brooks and Ryan Monk were impressive as a dysfunctional married couple behaving like children in Mother Figure, and stood apart in a set of well-performed monologues, Monk in particular with his spot-on portrayal of a creepy Yorkshire man, in the sombre closing play A Talk in the Park. Brooks was very funny to watch, and the same was true of Julia Kass and Olivia Bowman, who played off each other well in Drinking Companion. Best of all was Eleanor Colville in Between Mouthfuls, as the zealous waitress who insists on giving the best possible service to her customers.

But often the show lacked the energy that comedy needs to take off. Mother Figure had funny moments, but it needed pace to draw us into the silliness. The duologue that takes place for most of Drinking Companion is clearly meant to be comically awkward, but sadly the audience was painfully silent too. Perhaps if Kyle Turckhia had been directed to be more sinister, the scene could have treaded a gleefully edgy line between funny and uncomfortable. But the farcical slapstick in Gosforth’s Fete was a highlight, for which the set designer and technical crew deserve a lot of credit.

In the director’s notes for the show, George Kan says that Ayckbourn in Confusions holds up “a mirror to ourselves”. While this may have been true in 1973, I question whether it still is today, especially for the majority of the ADC’s audience, who were born in the late eighties at the earliest. Many of the jokes were about unhappy long-term marriages which are no longer the norm, and the cast struggled to convince as their characters, too many of whom were white middle-class stereotypes, which did not resonate with the audience. Any comedy falls flat if no one gets the joke – and no amount of great acting can remedy that. 

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