Communicating Doors is very cleverly contrived. The premise is ridiculous, but hey, it's theatre -- anything goes. The communicating doors of the title are in a hotel room, and they allow some of the characters to travel through time, returning to the same hotel room twenty years earlier. But not everybody gets transported, and not everybody gets transported to the same era. Confusing ? Perhaps, but Ayckbourn actually manages to lay it out fairly clearly, using what confusion there is to best comedic advantage.

​

The play starts in 2014, in a suite at the Regal Hotel. Julian has procured a prostitute for seventy year-old Reece Welles. The girl, Phoebe, is a dominatrix (the regular girl was unavailable) who goes by the name Poopay Daysir. As it turns out, Reece doesn't want her for what she usually gets paid for -- that would: "Finish me off altogether, in my condition", he observes. Instead he wants her to witness a confession and then deliver it to trusted hands.

​

Reece has been very successful in life, along with his business partner Julian, but it has come at a high cost. Two of Reece's wives were killed by Julian along the way, among other terrible deeds.
 

Julian gets wise to the fact that there is a confession revealing his crimes and that Poopay knows about them, and naturally plans to get rid of her as well. She escapes, sort of, through the infamous communicating doors, which toss her back twenty years into the same room in 1994. Ruella, Reece's first wife is there: as it happens, it's the night she is meant to die at Julian's hands.

​

It takes a while for the two to figure out that there has been some time-travel involved, but Ruella comes to believe Poopay. Her own trip through the communicating doors -- sending her to Reece's 1974 honeymoon night with his first wife, Jessica -- help convince her.
 

Julian, meanwhile is still after Poopay -- as well as Ruella, of course. There's some back and forth, and lots of amusing confusion and some decent suspense along the way. All's well that ends well, and Ayckbourn does knot things up very nicely.
 

This is a play populated by strong women; the men are largely patsies. The premise is completely illogical and non-sensical, and yet Ayckbourn fashions a convincing and even touching entertainment out of it. The situations unfold very nicely, and the comedy is robust throughout. It reads well, and when well-staged is absolutely hilarious. Recommended!