Season's Greetings (play)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the Alan Ayckbourn play. For other uses, see Season's Greetings.

Season's Greetings is a 1980 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn.

Season’s Greetings is a black, though often farcical, comedy about a dysfunctional family Christmas, set over Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day in an average English suburban house. Themes running through the play include the loss of passion in marriage, and the tragedy inherent in the achievement of only mediocrity in life.

Bernard, a feeble-spirited doctor, struggles to support his drunken lush of a wife, Phyllis, and hopelessly attempts to escape from his problems in performing a dismal puppet show for the household’s children (never seen). Belinda endures a stale relationship with Neville, he being always too busy fiddling with anything mechanical out in his shed; she resorting to flapping about the house and constantly dressing the Christmas tree.

Eddie, a lacklustre and lazy man who tried to strike out on his own but failed, sucks up to Neville for work; his pregnant wife Pattie is largely ignored, and can only nag at him and wish she were not having another child. Things are shaken up in the house as Clive, a suave writer, arrives, but he is caught up in a non-starter of a relationship with the emotionally fuddled Rachel (Belinda’s sister).

Throughout, Harvey, a cantankerous military man, bemoans the collapse of society whilst himself gorging on TV violence. Moments of comedy and climax in the play include Belinda and Clive’s disastrous attempt to make love after everyone has gone to bed (thwarted when they set off a toy drumming bear which alerts everyone else to what they are up to), Bernard’s fight with Harvey after his puppet show goes wrong, a drunken game of snakes and ladders, and Harvey shooting Clive at the end of the play having falsely suspected him of being a looter.

In many ways, Season’s Greetings is a sad story about thwarted ambitions, unhappiness in relationships and petty squabbles at a supposedly happy time of year. For that, its achievement is all the more pronounced because it is frequently hilarious and even light-hearted in its exposure of human frailties and inadequacies.