‘Yes, I fell asleep on stage. I blame Beckett’
As he returns to acting after half a century, Alan Ayckbourn shares his theatrical war stories with Dominic Cavendish
For three decades, Sir Alan Ayckbourn entertained London’s theatreland like no other playwright. He packed out houses, made audiences cry with laughter, amassed awards. Every year between 1970 and 2000 there was at least one Ayckbourn play in the West End, mining a rich tragicomic seam by drilling into the intricacies and peculiarities of personal relations (often among the middle-classes). Peter Hall called him an indispensable chronicler of post-war England.
In his adopted home town of Scarborough, he has continued to bolster the programme at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, which he ran from 1972 to 2009 (stepping down after a stroke in 2006). The 2020 summer season was expected to be lucrative, tourist-attracting business as usual: a revival of one of his classics combined with the premiere of a new work, both directed by Ayckbourn himself.
As we all know, though, a global crisis has scuppered our national drama. The summer season has been cancelled, the Stephen Joseph is shut, the outlook for the sector is bleak. Ayckbourn’s West End glory days are starting to embody a vanished era.
A dependably avuncular figure, Ayckbourn, 81, sounds gloomy when I call him at home. “We’re in a very dark period,” he says, straight off. Having devoted so much of his life to the Stephen Joseph, he fears for its survival. It hasn’t reached a crisis point yet but its viability is threatened: “Here we try to get as many people together in as small a space as possible – so it will be considered a high-risk place for the public.”
The long-term prospects for the art form don’t trouble him too much: “Theatre has always survived – it’s unique and has always managed to reinvent itself.” But for the first time in his life, he can see himself being cut off from the theatre world he adores. If the crisis runs and runs, the curtain may well fall on his long career as a director. “I’m in the vulnerable group, age-wise. I’ve resigned myself to not going back into a rehearsal room in my lifetime. I’m sadly aware of that possibility. If it does happen, I’m going to miss it a lot. It’s the other half of the writing process.”
At least at minimum he should be able to set foot in the building when it’s open again, I proffer. “That’s my hope,” he replies, “but it’s not a very strong hope.” He’s worried about the lack of high-level concern. “I think the Government needs to do more. I endorse what Sonia Friedman just wrote in the Telegraph. We need some kind of bail-out. She’s a commercial producer – it’s not her job to appeal for help for theatres across the UK but thank god she did. There’s nobody else stepping forward. Why isn’t the arts minister waving the banner?” Could he financially support the Stephen Joseph, if need be? A wry laugh. “I wish I could help but I only get revenue from stage plays – and once they’ve stopped, the tap turns off.”
What he can do is fly the flag for the venue in particular, the profession in general, by creative endeavour. If Ayckbourn can’t go to the theatre, the theatre can come to him, after a fashion. In a digital coup, his 84th play is being offered free (with the hope of donations) as an online audio drama. It’s called Anno Domino and is very much an “in-house” production. He has not only written it but directed, produced and starred in it too – opposite his wife Heather Stoney, like him a former actor.
The pair boldly take on four parts each, the characters ranging in age from 18 to the mid-70s (“I can still turn my hand to a bit of Peter Sellers vocal trickery,” he promises). “It was fun to do. We both enjoyed it. I hope that comes across.” Ayckbourn, a former BBC radio producer, recorded the effects himself. “I’ve always been one for ‘event theatre’,” he says, “something to make people go, ‘That sounds interesting.’ ”
The piece looks at what happens to an elderly married couple when one of their 40-something children splits from his wife on reaching their silver wedding anniversary. It’s archetypal Ayckbourn – a darkly comic play spinning from the domino-effect notion “that all relationships, however resilient they appear, are built on sand. It takes one couple to break up – then everyone is questioning their own relationship.”
He likens himself to Jane Austen, obsessed with the micro detail, not the macro picture: “I like to get close up and explore the way men and women, parents and children, all treat each other – it’s an endless source of interest to me.”
The project represents coming full circle, he acknowledges. It’s roughly 60 years since he met Stoney (whom he’d marry in 1997, shortly after his divorce from his first wife, Christine Roland, the mother of his two sons). They started out in Scarborough, thereafter treading the boards a lot, developing their friendship when the company relocated to Stoke-on-trent in 1962.
Ayckbourn took his final actorly bow after stepping in to prop up one of his own productions – the premiere run of
How the Other Half Loves (1969), which turned into an ad-libbing nightmare when he realised the final page of the script was missing. Worse than that, though, was the pair’s own final get-together on stage – in 1964 at Rotherham Civic Theatre in a twohander called Two for the Seesaw.
The young stage manager hadn’t unpacked the props – so Stoney vanished into the wings to find them, leaving Ayckbourn to play for time. “I was saying things like, ‘Do you want a hand out there?’ She said, ‘No, no…’ In the end I wandered off stage to find her on her knees fumbling with wrapping paper. I said to her at the end of the week, ‘The only consolation is that that little bugger is never going to work again.’” The culprit was future theatre producer supremo Bill Kenwright.
Though later praised by Harold Pinter (who directed him in The Birthday Party) as “born to play Hamlet”, Ayckbourn – who took on some 50 roles in that thespian flourish – thought of himself as seconddivision (“No one would have said, ‘Hey, Ayckbourn’s in it’”).
“He had burning eyes, so you could get very concentrated when you were working with him,” Stoney told Ayckbourn’s biographer Paul Allen, but also described his movement as “pretty terrible”. He agrees: “I wasn’t trained so didn’t know what to do with my arms and legs – so I just stood there.”
His early days left him with plenty of anecdotes. There was the time he fell asleep mid-performance while playing Vladimir in Waiting for Godot (“I think that was mainly Beckett’s fault”). There was also the “very embarrassing” occasion he drunkenly poured wine over Diana Rigg, then a stage manager at the York Opera House, after she refused a drink (“I tipped this bottle of red wine down her cleavage – and like a Laurel and Hardy sketch she sat there for some seconds without reacting… Nobody moved, no one could believe it. Then the men around her threw me out on the pavement”). The acting also taught him incalculable amounts (as it had done Pinter) about playwriting itself.
By eerie coincidence, the play that was to have premiered this summer, Truth Will Out, was about “the world being brought to an end by a virus, only the virus in this case was a computer virus. Nature has now come up with a valid alternative.” That dystopian vision follows soon after his epic The Divide (2017) – “born out of the [2014] Ebola outbreak – I thought, ‘What if it mutated to cause the sexes to have to separate?’” Very prescient.
He’s currently writing a new play but is keeping his counsel about the subject. “A play about China? No, no! I wouldn’t write a coronavirus play except very obliquely.” The world may be going to hell in a handcart, but as long as he is at his desk, dictating his work (“I’m limited in physical ability – I’m a head that writes plays”), theatre’s great survivor can still find some solace. “I thank God that I always seem to have another play in me. Somehow there’s always more to say.”
‘I tipped a bottle of wine down Diana Rigg’s cleavage. No one could believe it’