It’s time to recognise the genius of Ayckbourn
Dominic Cavendish salutes the man who, as he turns 80, deserves to be seen as Britain’s greatest living playwright
Next month – on April 12 – Sir Alan Ayckbourn turns 80. None of his near-contemporaries – however lauded or successful – can match his prolific output, his popular reach or his commercial prowess (he has had 40 shows in the West End, and his plays have been translated into more than 35 languages). So why is there no major retrospective at any of our major venues? “What he has given to the theatre is immeasurable,” declared Harold Pinter 20 years ago. But who will proclaim that today?
Perhaps it is because Sir Alan has long been preoccupied with the angst-ridden lives of the provincial and suburban middle classes that has seen him downplayed as a theatrical force by metropolitan arbiters of cultural “value”. Furthermore, his popularity, accessibility and gift for comedy have counted against him being given high artistic status. But taken in sum, his work amounts to an invaluable document of life as it has been lived by millions over the past half century.
Academic interest has always been slight – he was never seen as a radical writer to rival peers like Edward Bond or Caryl Churchill. And yet, despite never being fashionable, his influence has long been proven in the West End. Every year between 1970 and the millennium, there was at least one Ayckbourn in the West End. Although some of his later shows underperformed at the box office, for three decades he was the golden boy of Shaftesbury Avenue, and the subsidised sector loved him too. “In the heyday of his popular success, his influence ran like blood through the veins of theatre – it got everywhere,” says his biographer Paul Allen. “He gave reps cast-iron hits and audiences something they weren’t getting anywhere else.”
The onus then is on critics like myself to weigh up (and flag up) his artistic achievement. The first thing that needs stressing is that he is arguably unrivalled for creating substantial female roles – almost 320 in total so far.
Brigid Larmour, who runs Watford Palace Theatre and has revived three of his plays there, salutes his contribution: “He puts complex, mature women at the heart of his plays and gives them complex emotional journeys – whereas with most playwrights of his generation you will likely have a ratio favouring men and most of the journeys will be male. He has a very strong feminist streak.” The roots of his understanding of female experience and the gulf between the sexes go deep. Ayckbourn’s first marriage in 1957 came to a point of separation in 1971 (he divorced and remarried, to his partner Heather Stoney, only in 1997). Further back, his own parents (his novelist mother Irene Worley, known as “Lolly”, and violinist father Horace) never married. His father left when he was about five, and he grew up eavesdropping on the embittered barbs of badly treated women.
As he once put it: “I thought all mothers broke china in the morning, cursed men and took a huge typewriter out and banged on it till lunchtime.” When he was in his final year at boarding school (Haileybury) in 1956, Lolly had a nervous breakdown as the relationship with her second husband (Alan’s stepfather) collapsed. She received electroconvulsive therapy for depression.
According to Allen, that close relationship with a woman who combined outspoken eccentricity with the facets demanding, dissatisfied and distressed partly explains his preoccupations as a writer and need to keep working: “A lot of his female characters are on the verge of a breakdown. There’s no question that his mother still plays an important part in his unconscious and probably conscious thinking.”
Ayckbourn also excels at the tragicomic, dividing his audience between howls of laughter and yelps of appalled recognition at characters who struggle to communicate and connect. His once unusual mix of light and shade – which he has likened to “dancing on the edge of a razor blade” – reached an early apotheosis in a play that remains much loved (and is currently being revived in Watford), Absurd Person Singular (1972). In an unforgettable middle act, Eva, a depressive architect’s wife, silently seeks to do away with herself in her own kitchen, amid a Christmas party. Exploring different methods of suicide, she sticks her head in the oven, only to be fished out by the spick-and-span wife of a get-ahead tradesman: “That oven can wait. You clean it later …”
Critics may currently be adulating Pinter’s Betrayal for its backwards moving chronology, but Ayckbourn is
‘I thought all mothers broke china in the morning, cursed men and banged on a huge typewriter’
by far the bigger theatrical time lord. In How the Other Half Loves (1969), to take one early example, he sets up two dinner parties occurring on consecutive evenings and runs them concurrently, requiring split-second switching from the actors.
Ayckbourn’s playful coups de théâtre deploy tightly crafted structures to cut to the mess of human life.
The work has been hit and miss of late. Sometimes his colloquial dialogue has sounded flat, his plotting looked a bit plodding, his craftsmanship a dash workmanlike. Yet even on an off-day, as with his recent dystopian epic, The Divide, he’s interesting. Allen says: “Just as Beethoven when he got to the late quartets didn’t need to prove himself – so Ayckbourn doesn’t need to prove he can press audiences’ buttons.”
And for some admirers, he remains, to borrow a title of his, man of the moment. Matthew Warchus – who directed a 2008 revival of The Norman Conquests trilogy at the Old Vic (which he now runs) – believes that were more of his plays mounted in-the-round, as up in Scarborough (his adoptive home town where he ran the Stephen Joseph Theatre between 1972 and 2008), its daring would be apparent.
“By taking suburban life, putting it in extremis then placing it on an exposed platform, what he’s doing is abstracting it, making it a distant cousin of Beckett or Pinter … I used to think that if I ran the Royal Court I’d have his name up outside in neon.”
A new wave of interest is stirring among younger directors who are not slavish to previous snobberies surrounding the playwright. Tom Littler, 34, is reviving Ayckbourn’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, titled Dear Uncle, this summer. “The world of drinks before dinner and anxiety about the state of your kitchen isn’t reflective anymore of what people are socially preoccupied with,” he says. “But what’s underneath stays the same and the further we get from the Seventies and Eighties, I think the less we will mind about period. Reviving him will soon be like reviving Coward or Rattigan.”
The autumn sees the premiere of play number 83 (Birthdays Past, Birthdays Present) at Stephen Joseph. This continued output suggests an ongoing dedication to exploring the quirks of this small island which has so long fascinated him.
“To hell with posterity,” Ayckbourn opined early on in his 2002 guide to play-writing, “though ironically if you write a comedy truthfully and honestly, it is possible that the play might still survive because of its truth of observation.” Fanfare or not this year, the wisdom of that remark is being amply borne out.
Absurd Person Singular runs at the Watford Palace Theatre (01923 225671) to March 30; Dear Uncle runs at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick (017687 74411), Aug 1-Nov 2; Seasons Greetings runs July 25-Sept 28, Birthdays Past, Birthdays
Present runs Sept 4-Oct 5, both at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough (01723 370541)