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TO BED, OR NOT TO BED?
by Ray Smith

There was an interesting article by Michael Billington in the Arts section of yesterday's Guardian . (Yesterday being February 8). He makes the point that sex and death are two of dramas most enduring themes, and most people, if they are lucky, get to experience both in bed.
He goes on to state the obvious, that sex is one of life's driving passions and cites numerous examples of classical dramatists flogging the theme; you might say to death. He says that Ibsen, for example, filled his plays with characters (to quote a John Osborne simile) as sexually obsessed as a medieval monastery.
Since the heady days of the bed and bard, however, few playwrights have dared to challenge the morals of the time, or the Lord Chamberlain's office in the first half of the last century, by putting the bed on stage. Beds meant hank panky and hanky panky in any of its forms was ruthlessly blue-pencilled out of the script. Even Feydeau, the master of the farce, whose characters seemed to spend their time romping from bed to bed, seldom if ever, had a bed actually in view of the audience.

Since the Lady Chatterly trial, however, things have changed. You might say they've gone from bed to worse. The bedstead seems to have become one of the most important props in the theatre. It has come centre stage.
Michael Billington quotes numerous examples, including the National Theatre's 1985 production of Jim Cartright's aptly named "Bed", where seven elderly people spend their time lolloping around in a giant sized bed. He quotes other modern examples from Ayckbourn to Pinter and says we can expect to see more of the bed and I presume its occupants.

If all this obsession with bed and sex is so prolific in the professional theatre. Why has so little of the bed been seen in the amateur theatre? The answer seems to lie in the size of the contraption. Put a double bed on stage in a great many of the venues available locally to amateur groups and you're left with very little room in which the upright can manoeuvre.
Several groups have been enterprising enough to perform Ayckbourn's "Bedroom Farce", but most groups have shied away from this amusing play simply because the set would have been impossible to create satisfactorily. I saw the play performed by one group on a crowded stage where the cast had to queue up in order to move around.
I took part some years ago in Brian Clarke's brilliant play, "Whose Life is it anyway?". But this was on the large stage at the Boscombe Centre for Community Arts, and as it was a drama centring on the right of a paralysed individual to have his life support system switched off, the bed in question was a hospital bed, and the play more cerebral than sexual.
The bed for the most part still remains invisible to our audiences, but it is a challenge of the kind that most amateur directors rise to. You can be sure of one thing. They won't take it lying down.

RAY SMITH