My Wonderful Day

Artists in their late work often achieve truth through simple means. So it is with Alan Ayckbourn whose 73rd play, and his first since relinquishing his directorship of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, foregoes the formal wizardry that has become his trademark. What we get is a straight-through 105-minute piece that devastatingly demonstrates how children miss nothing that goes on around them, and much of its power derives from an extraordinary central performance by Ayesha Antoine. Antoine plays nine-year-old Winnie who accompanies her heavily pregnant mum on her cleaning duties at the house of a monstrously egotistical TV presenter, Kevin Tate. Winnie is parked in a corner to write a school essay titled My Wonderful Day. She's also told to speak only French in accordance with her mum's fantasy of returning to her homeland in Martinique. Winnie is ignored, patronised or treated as an ­uncomprehending idiot by the adults: not just the bullying householder but his infantile mistress and his hungover friend. Only the unexpectedly returning Mrs Tate, who happens to speak ­excellent French, treats Winnie seriously – with ­tumultuous consequences. Ayckbourn's point, based on his own experience, is that children see and hear everything: especially writerly kids from single-parent families. But, although the message and the form seem straight­forward, Ayckbourn makes ­excellent use of his stagecraft. There's an ­extraordinary sequence in which Winnie silently reads to herself from The Secret Garden while Tate's drunken mate snores: ­nothing is said but what you see is children's willingness to ­surrender to their ­imagination. And although race is never overtly mentioned, it provides a constant subtext: you suspect ­Winnie is overlooked by the adults not just because they assume she doesn't speak English, but also because she is black. Casting is obviously crucial and ­Antoine, in her late 20s, captures ­brilliantly Winnie's rapt absorption in her writing and observant shyness. My favourite moment came when, in response to Mrs Tate's vehement enquiry as to whether her husband might be in the bedroom, Antoine ­nervously replied: "C'est possible." Terence Booth as the bullying chauvinist, Alexandra Mathie as his sharp-tongued wife, Ruth Gibson as the ­mistress, Paul Kemp as the sottish chum and Petra Letang as the chattering cleaner are all exemplary. Roger ­Glossop's set and Mick Hughes's lighting, with its diamond-shaped patterns across the stage, also ­create the sensation of a multi-storied house in a startling play full of ­Ayckbourn's rueful, comic wisdom.