TWO STARS

 

The iron rules of time travel were fixed in Dr Who five decades ago. Or were they settled 50 years after that and then imposed retrospectively on the iconic (as it then wasn’t) science-fiction television series?

The answer to the question is obvious. No. Time travel, the capacity to defy the clock, is impossible. The principal proof of this is that you can’t go back to change what must be, because it has already been.

Surprises — a play about the ‘what if?’ of history — is therefore based on a nonsense. Also absurd is another premise central to its conception — that human life span is imminently likely to be hugely extended. Medicine’s capacity to replace “more and more physical bits of us”, which Alan Ayckbourn declares in a programme note to be encouraging evidence of this, will lead, he thinks, to lots of people like the healthy 120-year-olds we meet here.

The whole daft conceit of this play, Sir Alan’s 76th, appears to reflect the altruistic belief of its writer, himself aged 73, that life will go on for his characters indefinitely.

We might wish this for sparky schoolgirl Grace (Ayesha Antoine), though not perhaps for megarich dad Franklin (Bill Champion) whom we meet with her a few years into the future in their hugely high-tech house (designer Michael Holt). Mum, we learn, is away on a long-term interplanetary maintenance project.

Franklin’s wish to end what he sees as Grace’s unsuitable relationship with her labourer boyfriend Titus (Ben Porter) sets the plot in motion when he attempts to buy him off with a huge investment — take it and quit her — in his time-travel project.

In the second of the play’s three parts we meet the agent of this deal, hard-bitten lawyer Lorraine (Sarah Parks). That this tough cookie is really a softie is seen in her romance with — and ultimately long marriage to — a malfunctioning android called Jan (yes, we’re truly in sci-fi la-la land).

As portrayed with a sure comic touch by Richard Stacey, this likeable character proves the saving grace of this tiresome play. Faults in the wiring concerned with his reaction to humour lead to hyena-like bursts of laughter at inappropriate moments in the action. These are much louder than any heard from the audience.

Time travel? By 10.10pm, I was wishing I could turn the clock back three hours and spend my evening somewhere else.

 

Surprises is at Oxford Playhouse till Saturday. 01865 305305, www.oxfordplayhouse.com