Author Alan Ayckbourn

Door: The “communicating doors” of the title suggest the connecting doors between two London hotel suites and also portals to travel through time. It serves as a time machine and carries women who step through it either 20years forward or 20 years back in time.

Hotel: Hotel is not people’s home. People here are all passersby. Everything happens here such as murder, honeymoon, prostitution and so on seems pretty common in a hotel. It is also like a storage all the memories of people.

Confession: In his written confession, Reece admits to have arranged the murder of his wives, Jessica and Ruella, at the hand of his right-hand man, Julian. It is a microcosm of man’s violent world.

Summary

The "communicating doors" of the title are connecting doors between two London hotel suites and also portals to travel through time. The play opens in the year 2014 when London is torn by civil war. Poopay, a dominatrix with a soul of sunshine, has been summoned to the hotel suite, supposedly to provide the old, dying Reece with one last thrill. However, what Reece really wants is a witness to his signed confession. In it, he explains how he planned (and his sinister business partner Julian carried out) the murders of Reece's two wives. When the murderous Julian discovers the confession, the witness, Poopay, is on a run for her life.

When she attempts an escape through the connecting door, she winds up traveling back in time twenty years to the same London hotel suite in 1994. There she discovers Reece's second wife, Ruella, on the eve of her murder. Poopay has to convince her of what is about to happen to her. Ruella and Poopay eventually sort out their admittedly confusing circumstances, and decide to stand in with each other to fight for their own survivals, and at the same time, to rescue Reece’s first wife, Jessica. When Ruella uses the connecting doors later, she travels back to 1974. Here she meets Reece and his first wife. They are celebrating their honeymoon.

Now Ruella must convince Jessica that both of them are doomed to be murdered by their husband and his vile assistant. And all the while, the women keep going back and forth through the communicating door. They are trying to change the past in order to change the future and save their lives. At the end, they explore the feminist identity, and transform their lives for better.

Characters

Reece: He has been very successful in life, alone with his business partner Julian in the beginning. He is a typical businessman. His first wife is Jessica, and second wife, Ruella. However, Julian kills two of his wives. He wants Poopay to witness his confession. He is responsible for the murders of his two wives. But his fate is also changed when the women transform theirs.

Poopay (Phoebe): Poopay is a name of goddess (the sister of Apollo) and she is the central character of the play. Poopay is a dominatrix with a soul of sunshine and good nature. When she is summoned to the hotel, she finds herself suddenly the intended victim of the third murder. However, she reverses the destiny of others. She re-makes the past, and re-creates history. She also remakes herself.

Julian (J.S Goodman): Julian is the business partner of Reece. He is a vicious, cruel, and relentless character. He is a villain, and he kills Jessica, Ruella, and his mother. It is ironic with his name “Goodman”.

Ruella: She is the second wife of Reece. Ruella is a practical, honest, and intelligent woman. When she learns the truth from Poopay, she takes charge of the time traveling and attempts to change past and future. She is the woman that other women look up to.

Jessica: She is Reece’s first wife. Jessica comes from a good family, and Reece marries her for money. After Ruella’s warning, she divorces in time to escape from death.

Harold: He is the house detective. Harold is in all the 1994 and 2014 sequences.

Analysis

Communicating Doors is a comedy, a time travel adventure and a murder mystery. Time travel is the central idea of the play. The heroines use a hotel suite door to travel in twenty year increments. Three women, Poopay, Ruella and Jessica, reach across three periods (1974, 1994 and 2014) to communicate and build a defense against the villainous Julian. They travel through time to stop a murderer, and along the way they save themselves and each other, transforming their lives for the better. How to alter the course of events—murders past and present—becomes the theme of the play.

This naturally leads to the usual contradictions of time travel stories. The central character literally re-makes herself.

The time travel device functions not only as a clever twist on the comedy/ thriller genre, but also adds a new intellectual level to the play. It concludes with the certainties of the happy ending consistent with farce. It is a kind of wonderful hybrid—a "comedy-mystery-timetraveling thriller" that borders on farce. But because of the very real and very human exploration of the transformation of the central character the play is ultimately quite touching as well. This play is really about people who want to make the world a better place and about turning points in lives, people you meet who can change your life. In the middle of the play is a human story.

Comment

The conceit—the "gimmick“—is that we find ourselves in the same hotel suite in three different time periods with the same characters. Several of those characters are capable of "time traveling" between the periods. The time-traveling gimmick is fun but hardly frivolous: the play explores matters of fate and free will, and the ability of people to control their own destiny. This theatrical device is not only clever but also very artful.

It serves the story that Ayckbourn wishes to tell: a comedic thriller about three murders and the heroines' attempts to stop them, and also the theme of personal transformation he whishes to explore through that plot. Ultimately Communicating Doors is about the human capacity for self transformation, to re-make ourselves, to re-make our world—the human capacity to transcend.