While a great deal of extremely farcical shenanigans take place on stage during the course of this play, the most singularly absurd aspects is that it is persons who are never actually seen by the audience who become the central aspect which gives away the whole premise. A woman tries multiple times to silently commit suicide that gets continually thwarted by the unwitting interference of party guests blindly oblivious to her pain and consequence. Another woman leaves through the backdoor to freshen the supply of tonic water that is threatening to run dry, gets locked out, struggles to get the attention of those inside and when she does enter around through the front door goes thoroughly unrecognized by the partygoers. The play ends on a bitterly sour note in which two couples are forced to humiliate themselves for the enjoyment of another by playing an invented game called Musical Dancing by the husband but more Musical Forfeits by the more innocent wife.
Despite all the frenetic and often sad and occasionally traumatic action taking place in full view of the audience, however, playwright Alan Ayckbourn proves to be every bit as manipulative as Sidney Hopcroft, the master of ceremonies staging the humiliation dance to celebrate his rise to power and influence over those who had earlier looked down upon him with the snotty air of social superiority. Ayckbourn is a deft magician who has been hoodwinking the audience throughout by misdirecting the attention of anyone watching a performance of Absurd Person Singular into thinking that one of the those three suburban couples at whose houses a Christmas party is hosted over the course of three years is the most essential element in his story. Ayckbourn is a truly gifted magician, it must be admitted right now. Not only does he successfully fool the audience with a Pledge, but when he gets to the Turn, you don’t even realize it. Which makes the moment of the Prestige downright jaw-dropping. Here is the Prestige of the little trick of prestidigitation known as Absurd Person Singular:
Sidney: Well—(he pauses)—you know who ought to be here now?
Jane: Who?
Sidney: Dick Potter. He’d start it off.
Jane: With a bit of help from Lottie.
Sidney: True. True.
Ronald: Yes, well, for some odd reason we’re all feeling a bit low this evening. Don’t know why. But we were just all saying how we felt a bit down.
Jane: Oh . . .
Sidney: Oh dear oh dear.
Ronald: Just one of those evenings, you know. The point is you’ll have to excuse us if we’re not our usual cheery selves.
Like the man in the movie says, making something disappear in a magic act isn’t enough by itself. It’s only a real trick if it’s brought back with you still not being able to understand how the trick is done. The third act of a magic trick, the man says, is called the Prestige. And in the third act of Absurd Person Singular, the playwright brings back something which had earlier in Act Three disappeared without you even realizing there was a magic act taking place. Doick and Lottie Potter are every bit as much characters in the play as Sidney or Jane even though they are never, ever seen or really even heard much except for loud, harsh laughter. But the audience knows, nevertheless, that they are there. Somewhere. They may be invisible to the eye, but the mind knows what the eye does not. Think about it for a second. The playwright not only successfully makes the Potters disappear at the beginning of Act Three only to successfully bring them back, but what he made disappear was never there in the first place. They were invisible: literally to the audience and metaphorically to the characters on stage. Even Jane—who otherwise seems pleasant and nice enough—admits to this fact of life:
SIDNEY: Don't forget Dick and Lottie Potter. They're coming, too.
JANE: Oh, well, I don't count Dick and Lottie. They're friends.
At some point the playwright forces the audience to admit, if only to themselves, that Dick and Lottie Potter don’t count with them, either. One can rationalize with the old out of sight out of mind gambit, but it goes deeper than that. The Potters don’t count to the audience for the same reason they don’t count to Jane and the others: they do not appear to be essential to the narrative. In the case of Sidney and Jane, the Potters are not essential components of their narrative of social climbing. For the audience, they seem to lack substance because they do not directly impact the course of what they are seeing on stage. The audience probably comes to a realization right around the same time as the three couples enjoying their first Christmas party in three years without the unrecognized worth that Dick and Lottie brought with them.
Absurd Person Singular turns out to be not nearly as much about the power, corruption and lying in wait to best each other and leap one rung ahead of the other on the road to success as one has been led to assume. Only when the curtain is pulled back to reveal that it is the Potters of the world—which is to say the overwhelming bulk of those attending any performance of the play—that are responsible for holding everything together. Without the rest of us just trying to get by on our own terms, what would those who make a living out of trying to more successful than everyone else do? To get an idea, imagine how every narcissist int he world today would respond if tomorrow everyone on the planet suddenly turned into narcissists themselves. The increased competition if all the Potters became Hopcrofts, Jacksons or Brewster-Wrights would lead to a bloodbath and carnage. Not unlike the bloodbath and carnage of the Musical Forfeits competition which pulls the final curtain down on Ayckbourn’s absurdly extraordinary feat of theatrical legerdemain.
