A Brief History of Women
Written and directed by: Alan Ayckbourn The Stephen Joseph Theatre, Westborough, Scarborough (01723-370541) Until 7 October Running time: 2hrs 30mins (including interval)
At 78, Alan Ayckbourn is having “another prolific year”, said Mark Shenton in The Stage. The Divide, a dystopian six-hour epic in two parts, met with a muted response from Edinburgh critics. But with this, his second premiere of 2017, the playwright is back on “more familiar and satisfying territory”. A Brief History of Women is a “beautifully mapped memory play”, charting with “delicacy, verve and wit” the life of one ordinary man – and some of the women in his life – across 60 years. Antony Eden plays the man – Spates – at each stage of his life, “with eagerness, dignity and grace, while the other five actors create multiple characters with “chameleon-like cleverness”. The play’s “elegiac, reflective tone proves both moving and liberating as it reaches an ending of haunting beauty”.
As the piece moves through its four acts, all of them set in the same grand country house, it becomes “progressively more funny, more tender, more Ayckbourn”, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. We begin in 1925, when Spates is a 17-year-old footman who steals a kiss from the lady of the house after saving her from her husband’s violent rage. By 1945, the house has become a girls’ school where Spates is a teacher involved in a clandestine romance. In 1965, it’s an arts centre, where he comforts the betrayed wife of a pantomime dame. And in 1985, he is the retired manager of Kirkbridge Manor Hotel, welcoming back the 98-year-old Lady Caroline. The play gets richer as it goes on – alighting on moments of real connection amid the “bickering teachers, the gossiping toffs, the selfinvolved theatrefolk” – and reaches its “tear-inducingly tender” conclusion.
Part of the fun is to observe the mutating “character” of an English country house across the decades, and “the changing mores of men and women” with it, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. It’s an interesting, though hardly earth-shattering, conceit, and this nonvintage “late Ayckbourn” does not rank with his finest. But it is “worth seeking out” nonetheless.