Raise the roof for the master of middle-class wit (and tragedy)
Snobs sneer at him, but as Alan Ayckbourn turns 80 and writes his 83rd play . . .
Next week, Sir Alan Ayckbourn will celebrate his 80th birthday. eighty glorious years, during which he has written more than 80 plays — more than any living British dramatist and more than twice as many as Shakespeare.
Over half are stage staples, a few undying classics. If you enter a theatre anywhere in the country, professional or amateur, the odds are that Sir Alan has made you laugh, from his first West end hit in 1967, Relatively Speaking, to Absurd Person Singular, Bedroom Farce, How the Other Half Loves, A Chorus Of Disapproval, the Norman Conquests and on and on.
Your laugh may be an involuntary yelp: the refreshing shock of a ‘can-you-believe-it’ moment when you realise that yes, you can, because it arose from a very recognisable piece of human behaviour.
You may have met Ayckbourn’s work on film or a few TV adaptations but, rarely among modern playwrights, the master never writes directly for the screen.
One suspects that as a former actor and director, he is joyfully addicted to these moments of shared hysteria when we’re all in the same room. especially if the room is his beloved Scarborough circular theatre, the Stephen Joseph. All but four of his plays premiered there and he served as artistic director for 37 years.
Maybe there’s a character he created that sticks in your memory, with a smile. Perhaps the hopeless doctor in Season’s Greetings, pronouncing to the chaotic family: ‘this man is dead’ just before the aggrieved corpse sits up.
Or the furious amateur opera company director, Dafydd ap Llewellyn, in A Chorus Of Disapproval, snarling at his rival: ‘You bastard. One of these days I hope you get what’s coming to you. Having said that, best of luck for the show tonight.’
OR PERHAPS you boggled at the sheer interlocked ingenuity of the three plays in the Norman Conquests: a jigsaw in which each play shows what is happening, at the same time or adrift by minutes, in three parts of a dilapidated vicarage: dining room, living room, garden. Sometimes a character exits one play to join another, or comes in from a scene you’ve yet to see. extraordinarily, though, you can see them in any order and it still makes sense, both snortingly comic and personally tragic.
Ah yes, tragic: that is part of it, the wonderful thing about Ayckbourn’s observant, sad-heartedly compassionate vision. As he says, a comedy is just a tragedy that stops at a certain point.
Ayckbourn once said he wanted to see ‘how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.’
Over six decades of writing, he has
accumulated Olivier and tony Awards and been a knight these past 20 years. Yet because his plays run in provincial theatres even more than in the smart metropolitan centre, his very popularity makes smart cultural commentators overlook and underrate him.
the very different, far more culturally celebrated Harold Pinter recognised Sir Alan’s quality all right, though. ‘What he has given to the theatre is immeasurable,’ Pinter said. He understood the sheer craftsmanship of Ayckbourn’s lines, the heightened realism of his dialogue.
Perhaps another reason this national treasure is rarely the subject of big retrospective seasons is that he is writing about the middle classes rather than gritty social issues at the extremes. But since the wide span of the middle class comprises most of us, why not?
Besides, in any human life it is at the point when you are no longer struggling to survive that the great comic-tragic themes come up. envy, snobbery, jockeying for social position, unfulfilled yearnings to be something greater, adulteries that are incompetently hidden because you risk losing it all . . .
Ayckbourn is particularly good with women’s roles and was writing characterful, credible females of all ages long before the current anxious awareness that the theatre ought to represent us better.
there are disaffected women and troubled angry ones, suburban Gonerils and mice who roar. Or, at least, who find one killer final line, like mousey Mary in How the Other Half Loves. Long patronised by her husband, she apologises for his meltdown with: ‘It’s hard for him. He’s never been wrong before.’
He anatomises tricky unions, emotional constipation, delusion, the furious outburst that comes as a relief.
Sir Alan has been open about how his own early years taught him the awkwardness of human behaviour. His parents never married and his father, a violinist, left when he was five.
He grew up amid badly treated, resentful women. In his final year at boarding school, his novelist mother had a full breakdown after her marriage to his stepfather failed. As he once remarked: ‘I thought all mothers broke china in the morning, cursed men and took a huge typewriter out and banged on it till lunchtime.’
His first marriage, to Christine Roland, ended after 14 years (and two sons) in 1971. He moved in with the actress Heather Stoney, but didn’t divorce Roland until 1997.
Ayckbourn has never thrown despair in our face. there are wonderful lines, even in less-appreciated plays such as Arrivals And Departures: I never forgot the ruined hero saying: ‘Don’t get cynical, it’s what you call cool, but it destroys you, sucks all the goodness out of your life.’
Inevitably, there are moments when a new play doesn’t quite hit the button (like the latest, the Divide, an experimental piece). But whatever he does, Ayckbourn is a tremendous technician, not afraid to mess about with time and space; and always keeping a sharp eye on the new.
Occasionally, he heads into sci- fi territory: there is an android in Surprises. He skewered modern alt-Right paranoia nearly ten years back in Neighbourhood Watch, as his bumbling characters took us neatly through the evolution of fascism: conviction that your values are correct, fear of outsiders, building of defences followed by anxiety about the enemy within, policing of private behaviour, enrolment of thugs and a creepy fascination with punishment. It was funny — and a warning.
Meeting him as he came out of its London premiere, I was laughing still and said ‘Done it again, you old devil.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. And he keeps on doing it. His 83rd play, Birthdays Past, Birthdays Present, opens this autumn in Scarborough. I hope to be there.