Joyce Mcmillan
When Annabel Bolton first met Alan Ayckbourn, almost 20 years ago, she was a very young deputy stage manager arriving at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough for her first season’s work after a stage management apprenticeship, and he was already Sir Alan Ayckbourn, a giant of British theatre, one of its best-loved, most performed and most prolific contemporary playwrights.
Ayckbourn had been director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre since 1972, when he took over the artistic directorship a few years after the death of the theatre’s legendary founder, who was one of the pioneers of theatre-in-the-round in Britain; and although almost all his plays were premiered there, his magnificent, tragicomic social satires of the 1970s and 80s – including Absurd Person Singular, The Norman Conquests, A Chorus Of Disapproval, Woman In Mind, and a score of others – had also made him an acclaimed star of the national and international theatre scene. Yet if Bolton was in awe of the man, she soon found that there was no need to be afraid of him.
“What was he like?” she says, remembering how she managed to persuade Alan and his wife Heather that she could manage the vital DSM job, despite her youth. “Well, to be honest, I just think Alan is fabulous. He’s a theatre man who loves actors, loves the rehearsal room, and is just formidable in the amount of work he does – even now, with a show about to open in Edinburgh, he is in technical rehearsals for another show, and finishing the script of a third. He’s a write-aholic, I would say. He’s a lot of fun; and he’s hugely respectful of everyone involved in theatre, of stage managers and technical teams and actors and everyone. He is a great man.”
And now, almost two decades on, Bolton finds herself – as associate director at the Old Vic in London – directing the Edinburgh International Festival world premiere of Ayckbourn’s latest work, a mighty two-part epic called The Divide, set in a dystopian postplague England where the ravages of a disease transmitted through heterosexual contact have led to the complete separation of the sexes, enforced by a strictly authoritarian regime. The women, who carry the infection, wear black, while the men wear white, to signal their purity; the story follows the fortunes of a young brother and sister growing up in this divided world. And although Ayckbourn has ventured into science fiction and fantasy before, with plays like Henceforward (1987) and Comic Potential (1998), both featuring a world in which some human beings are replaced by robots, both he and Bolton feel that The Divide is unlike anything he has ever attempted before, at least in form.
“It really bears no resemblance to anything I have ever written before,” says Ayckbourn, now 78 and as active as ever, despite a major stroke back in 2006. “For one thing, I wrote it not as a play but as a draft scenario, or perhaps a graphic novel. It was shapeless, in five parts, nearly ten hours long, with a minimum cast of 30 and a reckless disregard for scenic or costume budgets. It was something which when the writer (me) had finished it, he turned to the director (me) and said, ‘There! Direct that if you dare!’ In other words, I stopped short in my writing process, disregarding my usual practice of solving practically all the staging problems. So until I see it in Edinburgh, you almost have as good an idea about what you’ll be seeing as I do.
“So far as the science-fiction element is concerned though – well, along with many of the writers in that genre whom I admire – Arthur C Clarke, Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Philip K Dick, Brian Aldiss – I regard sci-fi and fantasy as a way of posing questions about current trends and developments, either socially or politically. A sort of ‘what