Suburban bliss

On Wednesday to the very last performance of 'A Small Family Business' at the National, a revival of an Alan Ayckbourn farce on getting by in suburbia, revived from the late 1980's.

The show was worth going to for the set alone, a wonderful recreation of a substantial suburban house set in a crowded estate and on a rotating stage. Front view of house in-between times (along with stirring clouds, whizzing along behind), back view of cut-away house during the action, sometimes going on in several rooms at the same time. Didn't come across anything quite like it in streetview, although what I have posted does give something of the flavour. Let's hope the owners don't mind too much - a lot of the houses in the same general area seem to have been able to arrange things so that streetview can't peep in through their gates.

The story, as the title says, is of a family furniture manufacturing business, rather more than a shop but rather less than DFS (http://www.dfs.co.uk/), the people one knows so well from their efforts on ITV3. Bedroom antics on view for our entertainment. Various kinds of theft on view for our entertainment. The theft is puffed up into a morality tale in the programme, an inquiry into the various kinds of theft that go on in families and in businesses, from borrowing paper clips up. But I think that is all a bit too grand; the thing is just a good bit of entertainment. Plus a rather splendid sullen daughter and a rather splendid complaisant husband, keener on his fancy Porsche than on wondering about how his wife came to earn it. All good fun.

Pretty much a full house, of all ages. Some in clothes of the rather florid style one associates with theatrical and arty people - see, for example, Cora Lansquenet in the 2006 adaptation of  the 'After the Funeral' story from the Poirot collection. But no sign, to me anyway, that this was the last night. No special antics and no bouquets. Maybe there were subtle antics, visible to the cognoscenti, but they were not visible to me.

There were some further antics in the interval from a rather loud middle aged couple who seemed to be into creative writing, with one doing the writer while the other did the literary agent. All very odd, maybe they were attending classes in creative writing in the evenings rather than professionals. The writer left half her wine, almost challenging me to drink it up for her, but if she was, I failed the challenge. I might have passed just a few years ago.

As it happens the wine was adequate, nothing like as good as at Tate Britain.