If, like Alan Ayckbourn, you had 89 plays under your belt, what would your worst nightmare be? Could anything be scarier than reaching your 90th only to find no audience left to watch it? Worse, what if the few who did pay attention found it irrelevant? What if it seemed like a relic from another era, as dated as a polemical 1960s drama from Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 or a sexist French farce from the days of weekly rep?
That 90th play is Show & Tell and although its principal character, Jack, is a retired managing director of a department store, he carries something of the impotent fury of King Lear, if not the fading magic of Prospero. Played by Bill Champion with a mix of suaveness, bluster and dementia-related violence, he is a king without a domain, as ineffectual as a playwright without a theatre.
