more colins please!

been enjoying some very good summer reads.

read again - and with much enjoyment - alan ayckbourn's play "absent friends".
in my first year of drama in singapore i was actually cast in it as diana, the unhappy and resentful wife of paul.
i loved playing diana - a character who keeps sheepish despite being bossed around...but then goes mental big time.

re-reading "absent friends" - i realised it is perhaps one of the best pieces of writing on friendship with very contemporary references to how twisted and sad relationships can turn, when faulted by envy and mediocrity.

the plot of the play is as follows:

Diana has organised a tea party for Colin, an old friend of her husband Paul. Colin’s fiancé has recently drowned and the aim is to cheer him up with a gathering of old friends Paul, John and Gordon.
Gordon is, typically, ill and his wife Marge turns up instead, while Paul and John are less than enthusiastic about the party.
All this hides deep problems: Paul has had a brief affair with John’s wife Evelyn – who has brought her ("funny looking") baby Wayne to the party and is dismissive of Paul’s love-making; Marge is desperate for a child of her own and has transferred her maternal instincts on to an increasingly dependent and accident-prone Gordon; Diana is desperately unhappy, misses her children who are at boarding school and is bullied by Paul – who she suspects of having a major affair with Evelyn; John is aware of Evelyn’s affair, but is dependent on Paul for employment. Both John and Paul are so uncomfortable with the idea of meeting Colin that they play down their friendship to the point of almost non-existence.
The majority of this emerges before Colin has even arrived and just as matters threaten to erupt, the man himself turns up and everyone awkwardly tries to both be nice to him and to get on with each other.
But all have seriously misjudged Colin, who is seriously happy. He is blissful in the memory of the time he spent with his fiancé; annoyingly happy in fact. His apparent satisfaction with his life, despite his loss, merely highlights the depths to which all those around have sunk and his attempts to sort out their problems merely creates further rifts in the already damaged relationships of the other couples.
Colin is largely oblivious to everything deteriorating around him and finally recalls that Paul once secretly took one of Diana’s handkerchiefs, when they were first in love. Paul reveals he still has it… and uses it to clean the car. Diana, practically at the edge anyway, snaps and pours a jug of cream over him before breaking down in front of everyone, recalling how she longed to be a Canadian Mountie (??) when young. She is sedated and Colin departs, secure in his own memories – leaving all the others isolated and alone.

what i found striking the first times i went through the script and what hit me even more recently is how terribly wicked is the way everyone goes out of their way to show extreme pity for colin - while he is the only "complete" and put-together carachter.
everybody else is a bundle of nerves, total self indulgence and petty frustrations - whereas colin (the only person who experienced real and recent pain first hand)...has a sensitive and quiet grip of himself while remaining an upbeat, sensitive and strong person.

i think people in general do that all the time - they envy and pity without even remotely knowing what your real life and inner thoughts actually are.

and friends are, yes, quite often more absent than friends.