The Times 4 Star Review of The Girl Next Door

The Girl Next Door review — Ayckbourn’s entertaining time-travelling romance

★★★★☆
How did you spend your lockdown? Rob, the ageing TV heart-throb hero of Alan Ayckbourn’s 85th full-length play, had one to remember. Stuck at home in north London, he finds himself falling for his unsuitable new neighbour. A new neighbour who is not only a married mum of two in her twenties but also a housewife from 1942. He and his economist sister have Zoom meetings and tedium to put up with. Lily has air raids, evacuee kids and a husband fighting at El Alamein.

You’ve got to hand it to the staggeringly prolific Ayckbourn, here directing the main cast while another director works separately with a back-up cast in case Covid strikes any of the main four actors. The Girl Next Door, the first of four plays he wrote last year, is once again as full of ideas and empathy for characters straining against their straitened realities as it is with playful tweaks on storytelling. Yes, some of the set-up could be swifter, which would leave more time to develop promising rather than fully realised characters. Heavens, though, there is wit, warmth and mischief to be found here.

Kevin Jenkins’s fine set shows us one kitchen and garden nudging up against the other. The way the characters can squeeze through the hedge to travel 78 years backwards or forwards is never explained (probably for the best), except when Rob draws on the time-travel lingo he has gleaned from occasional roles in Star Trek and Doctor Who. What matter more are the moments of culture clash through the decades. Pointed ones, as they touch on changing attitudes to race, gender and sexuality and how Lily copes with her horrendously upended daily life. Joyously funny, as Rob takes Lily through the gear in his modern kitchen: “This is my stove, with its induction hob . . . conventional oven, fan-assisted of course.”

Bill Champion gives a delightful lead performance as the vain but adorable Rob. He has depressive incidents and remains bitter about losing his prime 1990s TV role as a heroic Second World War firefighter. Yet we know, through the presence of the forthrightly funny Alexandra Mathie as his sister and housemate, that he is not imagining all this. It’s a shame that there isn’t more room to explore a supposed love between him and Lily that only really plays here as a glimmer of attraction.

And if Lily is asked to stay in her mustn’t-grumble gear a touch too much, for all that Ayckbourn allows her fear, desire and frustration to seep through, Naomi Petersen absolutely nails the seriocomic tone needed. Linford Johnson has fun as the outwardly boorish, inwardly scared husband who should have died in the war but somehow didn’t. Alternative time streams? No, Ayckbourn knows that we only get one life, and we bodge through it as best we can. Yes, the speed of its creation leaves it a fair few tweaks away from perfection, but The Girl Next Door is inventive and empathetic, timely and fun.