Seasons Greetings by Alan Ayckbourn
Do you look back on last Christmas with fondness or horror? Either way, Thurrock Courts Players will provide you with a comic reminder in their forthcoming production of Season’s Greetings by Alan Ayckbourn, one of the country’s most successful playwrights.
It’s Christmas Eve and Neville and his wife Belinda are the hosts, entertaining a former colleague of Neville’s and his heavily pregnant wife. Both marriages are desperately unhappy, the husbands complacent bores, the wives feeling unloved and neglected. Other guests include Belinda’s virginal unmarried sister, who has invited her new boyfriend, and Neville’s alcoholic sister. Her hopeless GP of a husband is preparing for his annual puppet show. The explosive cherry on the comic cake is Neville’s near-psychopathic security guard of an uncle, who wears a knife strapped to his calf. He is giving all the kiddies guns for Christmas and has prepared a few nasty surprises for the grown-ups too. Then something even more disastrous occurs…
Premiered in 1980, such is its popularity, the play has been performed regularly every year since then. Its West End run was in 1982 at the Apollo. The BBC produced it for TV in 1986 and, more recently, it enjoyed a successful revival at The National Theatre in 2010/11 featuring Catherine Tate.
Season’s Greetings is performed at the Thameside Theatre, Grays from 7-9 February 2013 at 7.45pm. Tickets are priced at £10/8 and are available via the Box Office 0845 300 5264.
