Master of marital pain

House and Garden
Stephen Joseph Theatre

Sitting comfortably? I'll begin. Alan Ayckbourn's new play, House, set on a Saturday in August, is being staged in Scarborough's proscenium arch McCarthy Theatre. Meanwhile, Ayckbourn's Garden, which takes place during the same period, is presented simultaneously in the adjacent theatre. The same characters appear in both, which suggests a third, unseen drama taking place offstage with actors madly commuting between the two venues.

Even by Ayckbourn's standards, this is a mind-boggling technical feat. In The Norman Conquests he offered us three perspectives on the same country weekend. But here, because the action is simultaneous, the plays have to be perfectly synchronised. What happens if audience reaction in one house throws the timing? Ayckbourn has even built in adjustable comic business to ensure that the two plays reach their destination on time and enable the actors to take overlapping curtain calls.

The danger is one becomes obsessed by the stopwatch mechanics and ignores the content. But, seen together, the plays offer an extraordinary comic-melancholic vision of married life in which women end up as resilient victims. House, in particular, is one of Ayckbourn's best plays - a study in domestic disintegration in which much of the key action happens offstage.

House is set in the sitting-room of the wealthy Teddy Platt, a bovine adulterer who is being sounded out by a visiting political fixer about standing as the local MP. The problem is that Teddy's wife refuses to acknowledge his existence, his latest affair with his best friend's spouse is publicly exposed and he becomes embroiled with a dipso French actress who is opening the fete at the bottom of his garden. The play fulfils the definition of farce as the worst day of your life. But it is also a devastating study of differing patterns of destruction.

Teddy, played by Robert Blythe with just the right blundering crassness, is a man who has destroyed his marriage to his well-bred wife (Eileen Battye) through emotional insensitivity. But Ayckbourn introduces a more suave destroyer in the shape of the Tory power-broker, Gavin Ryng-Mayne. In a scene of brutal brilliance, the latter swats off Teddy's bright-eyed, sexually eager schoolgirl daughter as casually as if crushing a fly. As played by Terence Booth and Charlie Mayes, the scene demonstrates the devastation caused by cold-heartedness.

If I prefer House to Garden, it is because so much is left to our imagination: we can envisage both the emotional havoc taking place in the lower meadow and the sodden awfulness of a summer fete. In Garden, we see all this for ourselves. But Ayckbourn also subtly introduces another form of marital destruction: as Barry McCarthy's saintly doctor learns that his wife, beautifully played by Janie Dee, has been having an affair with his best friend, we see the ruinous effect of selfless tolerance.

You have to see both plays to understand Ayckbourn's overall design, and to realise that he is consciously echoing previous plays, such as Woman in Mind and Just Between Ourselves, while introducing new ideas, such as the disruptive effect of a non-English speaking movie actress, played with glamorous skittishness by Sabine Azema. And only when you see both plays do you appreciate the technical ingenuity by which actors serve two masters simultaneously.

Ayckbourn shows not just how social rituals descend into chaos but how women require steel and nerve to transcend the brutalising conventions of middle-class marriage. He is an instinctive feminist and these extraordinary plays, which do something unparalleled in the history of drama, eloquently prove the point.