Ayckbourn’s six-hour, lumbering dud has become a spry delight
The Divide Old Vic
Ais for “Ayckbourn”. A is also for “Aargh!” This dystopian magnum opus from Sir
Alan united critics in a chorus of disapproval when it opened in Edinburgh last summer, primarily because it went on and on: two parts, a punishing six hours.
Now, it has been radically trimmed to form one evening. It’s still too long (at almost four hours) but the good news is that a lumbering dud has become a spry delight, a seeming self-indulgence a matter of import and talking-point value.
The bad news is that its run at the Old Vic was way too short. I think many teenagers would love it – it deals, in a Romeo and Juliet meets Nineteen
Eighty-four way, with forbidden desire, repressive authority, young love, sexual awakening. The nation’s youth is on holiday this week. And the production closed on Saturday.
That said, the timing of this transfer is beneficial in a different way. There was – and remains – something vaguely preposterous as well as bravely provocative about Ayckbourn’s vision of a disunited kingdom running along strict gender lines (following the devastation wrought by a now solely maleimperilling plague), with brutish men gathered north of the cordon sanitaire and a primly civilised sisterhood, the very model of old-style puritanism, residing to the south – everything controlled by a mysterious, Old Testament-style religious authority.
No society could become that polarised except in a flight of fancy, could it? Yet where is the current climate of intense debate surrounding male/female relations headed? “Women and men are a separate species,” our heroine-narrator for the night, a girl called Soween, cheerily affirms, rehearsing the orthodoxy as if by rote and outlining the grisly capital punishment that awaits females who fatally infect menfolk. “It makes no
‘What looked worlds away a mere six months ago has acquired a more pertinent satirical bite in the interim’
more sense for a man to live with a woman than it does for him to live with a giraffe or for her to live with a jellyfish. Men and women are a danger to each other.”
Isn’t that just a variant on the kind of extreme viewpoint doing the rounds on social media in the wake of #Metoo? What still looked worlds removed from the Britain of today a mere six months ago has acquired a more pertinent satirical bite in the interim. And the play’s imagined interdict against Western art’s fleshadmiring masterpieces (our boy-hero, Jake Davies’s wide-eyed Elihu, is furtively awakened in all senses by the sight of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus)
– feels chillingly apt in the wake of the Manchester Art Gallery’s temporary removal of John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs.
We’re allowed to reflect on the antagonistic state we’re in, then, even as we marvel at the determination of Ayckbourn, the 13-strong cast and the creative team – headed by director Annabel Bolton – to realise this nightmare in rich detail, deploying stark, imposing lighting, flourishes of visual splendour and achingly beautiful (live-sung) compositions.
Everything Erin Doherty’s Soween says carries huge conviction. Her luminous central performance (starwattage as bright as anything you’ll see elsewhere this year) lights the way along this sustained (but not insufferably so) plea from a playwright long steeped in contemplation of relations between the sexes for men, women – everyone – to throw away the rule-book and live a little.