Welcome to Forest Jubilee Theatre

The play "Comic Potential" comes from two of Ayckbourn's "Bêtes Noires" as he described in an interview in 1998 before it's production at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. His first is the loathing of the budget soap operas with mechanical actors. With actors picked more for looks than acting ability. They move and talk as if they were robots. His second is technology and peoples faith that it is infallible. He says, "We spend our time hammering our fists against computers and the things that have hidden a day's work within them and refuse to reveal it. Those hole in the wall machines 'Give me back my card!' And I thought, well this gives me another chance to have a go at that.". Carried from that, he wrote this play in the near future with "actoids" replacing actors, keeping the same mechanical properties and a tendancy to go wrong (as human actors often do in these soap operas). "To err is human, to really screw up you need a computer". In "Comic Potential" the going wrong is caused by an actoid "Jacie" developing human traits against her programming.

Sir Alan Ayckbourn