Report from Una McCormack and Nicola Collie on A
FAMILY AFFAIR, at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge

Una:

I liked the play, which I thought was entertaining, if
a little slight. It centres around a group of family
members who spend a Friday evening bickering at each
other at the bar owned by the oldest brother. It's kind of
like a French version of 'The Royle Family', I suppose.
As one of the actors said in the talk afterwards, you know
that this family will just come back next Friday and do
exactly the same thing again.

To some extent, I think you'd need to see the production
several times across the run, since you start to get to
know the characters and get more interested in watching
them interact. Almost everyone is on stage for the
whole play, so you could happily sit and watch what one
character is doing throughout, and then go back to see
another. This is still very early in the run, so it would be
interesting to go again a couple of months on, and
see how the performances had changed. The woman
playing the mother said that she'd already made her more
monstrous (she's particularly good in her part). Moreover,
because there's so much going on at any one time, it's
obviously a play that's extremely challenging and
satisfying for the actors, and the performances were
excellent. They're clearly having a lot of fun up there.

Anyway, there was a bit of extra drama in the evening.
About 30 minutes into the first act, there was the sudden
sound of a klaxon, the lights went up, and a voice
requested us all to leave the building. Since the
play was pretty jokey, and there'd already been a few
pyrotechnic gags, the audience started laughing. And
then the cast said, 'Er, well, this isn't down to us, we think
you'd better start going...' and out we all trooped. It was
about half an hour before we got back in (there wasn't a
fire).

When the alarm had gone off, Pacey's character had been
making a phone call. When we'd all settled down, and the
lights went back down, he was there on the phone again.
He looked out at the audience, and said, 'Could you hurry
up, please? This is costing me a fortune!' Very, very
funny.  What a smoothie! It was quite brilliant, since it
put us right back in the mood for the rest of the play.
They only had about eight minutes of the first act left,
which must have been *very* difficult to do.

Anyway, I enjoyed it, altho' the night was probably made
by the alarm going off. To some extent the play itself is
pretty irrelevant, but I got a lot of entertainment watching
a bunch of actors enjoy themselves immensely. 

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From Nicola:

We also stayed for the post-show discussion (I think they
are doing one in each location). Steven and a couple of
the others came out a couple of minutes earlier than the
rest of the cast, and started answering questions straight
away. Steven was clearly keen to chat to us and said
some interesting things, but Rik Mayall pretty much
dominated the proceedings once he appeared, which was
a bit of a shame. Anyway, it seems none of them had had
to stop a performance for an evacuation before. They also
talked about the structure of the script - it required more
than the usual level of concentration as the lines weaved
around each other (typical family of self-absorbed
individuals!) rather than one cueing the next.  There were
several nods from the audience when it was suggested
that everyone could see elements of their own families in
the characters :)

Steven looked very cute in the little glasses he was
wearing for the chat.  And he smiled a lot. That's a
dazzling smile.... 

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More from Nicola (on the evacuation):

I overheard a little boy asking a staff member what had
happened - he was told that "a sensor had been
accidentally tripped" or something to that effect. So false
alarm due to equipment fault. We still had to hang around
while the boys from the big red truck checked that
nothing was smouldering. It didn't obviously disrupt the
flow of the performance, and rather than going off the
boil, the audience seemed more ready to respond
than before. Steven's ad-lib was right in character, too -
both for the person he was playing and the situation he
was in at the time. 

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More from Una:

In the chat afterwards, the cast said that they'd discussed
what to do when they came back on, but I think Steven's
line was a surprise to them all - at least, they were all in
stitches as well when he said it.