New Ayckbourn play Life of Riley comes to Malvern (From Malvern Gazette)

New Ayckbourn play Life of Riley comes to Malvern

1:20pm Tuesday 22nd February 2011 in Theatre

ALAN Ayckbourn’s new play, Life of Riley, is at Malvern Theatres from Tuesday, March 8 for one week only, featuring an all-star cast.

With a few months of his life remaining, George Riley’s closest friends remember with love, nostalgia or occasional bursts of downright fury, how deeply he has affected all their past lives. George, though, is plotting one final farewell that threatens to upset all their future lives. What exactly is the eccentric maverick playing at?

Alan Ayckbourn’s latest play, likewise, looks backwards, forwards and, now and then, sideways with wry comic affection on the lives we lived or might have lived.

He said: “Life of Riley is about a man who’s dying. A man called George Riley who never actually appears, it’s all his friends gathering around trying to sort him out in his final months. And unseen George sorts them out.

"There’s always a dark side to humour. I always say that if you write a play with all light, you get snow-blind. You have to have shadows to appreciate lightness.”

Alan Ayckbourn returns to direct the play after receiving a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre.

Life of Riley stars: Laura Doddington (Miss Yesterday and Improbable Fiction); Liza Goddard (If I Were You and Life and Beth); Laura Howard (Cully Barnarby in Midsomer Murders); Jamie Kenna (the film Children Of Men), Ben Porter (Woman in Black, West End); and Kim Wall (Man of the Moment).

Tickets available from £18.50 (under 26s £8) on 01684 892277 or at malvern-theatres.co.uk.