Comic Potential is a romantic comedy set in the forseeable future when everything has changed except human nature ...

Writer Adam Transmith is given the opportunity to work with Chandler Tate, Adam's hero who used to direct comedy films. Chandler has fallen on hard times though, and is now reduced to daytime soaps - and not even with real actors. Dwindling budgets force him to work with actoids. Android actors programmed to perform any emotion, but with no emotions of their own. Then Adam finds the exception, Jacie, an actoid with a real sense of humour and they decide to make a programme together. Of course they soon discover they have more in common than the ability to find a custard pie in someone's face funny.

John Pattison's music for Comic Potential is an electronic tour de force. This 'straight play' contains over an hour of original music. A specially commissioned score ranging from lush, romantic orchestral themes to futuristic sleazy nightclubs via daytime soap opera music and passages that would be at home in an action movie.

Comic Potential is Alan Ayckbourn's fifty third full-length play. It was first performed at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough in 1998 and received its West End premier at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue in October 1999.

If you have RealAudio you will hear the theme from the soap opera 'Hospital hearts', Jacie's love theme, Jacie's 'Lost in London' theme, and the futuristic 'Hotel Mombassa' underscore. More themes from Comic Potential can be found on the CD 'Ayckbourn Music'. Click here for more information.