More Downton novelty than vintage Ayckbourn
A Brief History of Women Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough
Even if Alan Ayckbourn produces nothing but duds for the rest of his days, they won’t diminish his venerated status nor lessen my resolve to seek them out. He has written so much that matters that it hardly weighs in the balance if “late Ayckbourn” is more to be endured than enjoyed. After his punishing dystopian epic at Edinburgh, The Divide, he’s back in Scarborough and on more familiar, gently tragicomic, socially relatable terrain. His 81st play lives up to its title in being (relatively) short-lived, but it’s so sketchily written and baldly schematic that, for all its underlying ambition and innocuous entertainment value, it put me in mind of that gag in A Midsummer Night’s Dream about the “tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe”.
The grand central conceit here is to observe the mutating “character” of an English country house across a span of 60 years, from 1925 to 1985 – and the changing mores of men and women, particularly (obviously) women, in the process. There’s an unmistakable tinkle of Downton Abbey in the first of four parts, in which a fatal spat erupts between a sexist old aristocratic pig (Russell Dixon’s Lord of “Kirkbridge Manor”) and his gin-sozzled young wife (a gold-digger standing to inherit nothing) during a jazzy engagement party for the latter’s awful daughter.
“First they got the vote, what comes next? Socialism!” roars the caricature curmudgeon, and there are plenty more heavily expository lines where that came from. Dancing attendance on this monster – but gallantly helping the beast’s pretty, put-upon spouse, who rewards him with his first kiss – is a casual servant called Spates.
Played (rather implausibly, given he’s supposed to be 17) by thirtysomething actor Antony Eden, this marginal figure lingers improbably on in this bucolic neck of the woods. He pops up as a lovelorn teacher when the manor becomes a girls prep school, circa 1945, then as a lonely arts centre administrator embroiled in a mid-sixties panto rehearsal. Finally, he’s the old-world courteous retired manager of a posh hotel, greeting the former Lady Caroline (Frances Marshall again) who still remembers that kiss.
“In my beginning is my end. In succession/ Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,” run those lines from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. Little of that poem’s poignancy is to be found in this workaday affair (much encumbered by the need for the diligently versatile cast of six to mime every door-opening and closing). Yet despite itself, simply because it attests all the same to Ayckbourn’s own story of tenacity, longevity and attachment to place, it stirs something like gratitude and admiration.
There are worse ways of wasting an evening – and aside from this minor curiosity, Ayckbourn is further directing a revival in rep of his 1979 farce Taking Steps, which is said to have caused so much laughter on its opening night, it broke the theatre’s Tannoy system.
In rep until Oct 7. Tickets: 01723 370541; sjt.uk.com