Plaza Suite, The Mill at Sonning

3:46pm Wednesday 13th August 2008

Playwright Neil Simon was still in the first of his five marriages when he penned this bitter-sweet triptych, set in a New York hotel, so perhaps not all the world-weariness of this 1968 work about the pitfalls of relationships can be attributed to his own experience.

The two-act play comprises three vignettes, all set in suite 719 of the Plaza Hotel, and featuring three separate couples. The first of these couplings is the most serious; the second flirts with poignancy but is content to be mostly tongue-in-cheek; and the third offers relief from the often sour tone of Plaza Suite by indulging in farce.

In each case, the leads are played by Terence Booth (no stranger to Sonning, having been here last year in Michael Frayn's Alphabetical Order) and Issy van Randwyck, who hails from the realm of cabaret. They are supported by Kelly Hotten and Jonathan Niton, the latter engaged only in cameo roles.

Like Karen Nash in the first segment, fretting about her husband Sam being more interested in his balance sheets than getting between the sheets with her after 24 years of marriage, the play's age shows (there is a dashingly contemporary mention, over the canapes, of an IBM computer), and the laughs early on during the opening night were generous, but the dialogue - particularly once it is revealed that the health-obssessed husband has been philandering - is enjoyably pithy: the wife is particularly bitter at the banal, predictable way her husband has taken up with his leggy blonde secretary. Was he too lazy to seek an affair outside the office, she muses?

Age is another preoccupation in the second part, in which louche movie mogul Jesse Kiplinger casts a lecherous eye over Muriel Tate, a former old flame, now a buxom housewife who gulps vodka Stingers between feeble protestations that she's not really that sort of girl.

Some of the laughter, however, results from sneering at the characters, neither of whom is likeable: Booth's lecher is a caricature, sporting a neckerchief and white shoes, while van Randwyck is a pneumatic bimbo, in figure-hugging pink dress and high boots.

The best is served last; a long-married couple, Roy and Norma Hubley, are panic-stricken when their daughter locks herself in the bathroom only minutes before her wedding, having had second thoughts - and fearing she and her fiancé will turn out like her parents, given time. When attempting to batter down the door fails, Roy decides to climb on to the window ledge . . . with, as they say, hilarious results.

Director Anthony Valentine, who was also at the helm of Alphabetical Order has played safe with this easygoing production, but it's all good grist for the Mill.

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