Ayckbourn soldiers on manfully
Hero’s Welcome Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough
It’s not a nice neat number – but it’s still an incredible feat. This is Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s 56th year as a playwright, and with Hero’s Welcome, his latest offering, he’s only one away from completing his 80th play. Doesn’t the man deserve a deck of medals, along with his knighthood? What with his stroke in 2006, it’s inspiring that, at 76, he’s still hard at it: having got this up and running, he’ll turn his attention to a staged reading of The Divide, “a five-part satire of the sexes, written for more than 30 voices”. Bernard Shaw, eat your heart out.
I wish I could give opus no 79 a 21-gun salute but I’m afraid it’s more filler than killer. It concerns the northern homecoming of a British soldier called Murray whose courage in foreign parts (presumed Afghanistan) has made him a local hero. Although the evening begins with a mock-up BBC Look North interview, Ayckbourn fights shy of the more obvious topical issues, and turns his dramatic fire on personal grievances that have been simmering in Murray’s 17-year absence instead. He went off with his best pal’s girl – then jilted her, when pregnant, at the altar. Is he hero or villain?
The truth – established through more overt exposition than you get in a month of soap operas – is not crudely black-and-white, but it’s soon clear whose side the playwright is on. Staying in his usual serio-comic discomfort zone of marital friction and domestic strife, Ayckbourn’s women emerge as the stronger, braver types.
Murray’s brought-home young bride, the modest, amicable Baba, learns the language fast and gets the lie of the sexually treacherous land. The woman he abandoned – Alice – has become the local mayor; she stoically suffers the regressive tendencies of her model trainsfanatic husband Derek and, later on, a suddenly incapacitating illness. The pluckiest of them all is Kara, the resolutely upbeat but timid wife of Murray’s former best friend, Brad; the latter’s bitterness has blended with arrogance and lechery to make him toxic company, and this shoot-fromthe-hip alpha male gets more than he bargains for on his home rifle range.
The subject, then, is the deficiency of the English male: all that pointless rivalry, with those retiring from the fray somehow unmanned too, and the opposite sex caught in the crossfire.
Showing a typical, rather masculine, attention to technical detail, Ayckbourn doesn’t just tell us about the toy railway snaking through Derek’s home, he repeatedly has a working section of it come to distracting life: it’s at once risible and poignantly emblematic – not only (we glean) of a lost child, but of all those yesterdays of innocent, comradely boyhood that Murray and Brad can no longer reach.
Ayckbourn, who also directs, lays out too many scenes in televisual segments, making it slightly stopstart. Some of the characterisation is sketchy; we could do with more depth, less plot. Only some of the writing bites: “Love’s a sexual smokescreen, darling,” sneers Stephen Billington’s Brad, “when it’s cleared, there’s bugger all there.”
Aside from one odd bit of miscasting – Russell Dixon is about a generation too old to be Alice’s hubby Derek – the acting is more than serviceable, especially from the wiry, intense Richard Stacey, reminiscent of Christopher Eccleston in looks, who, as Murray, is determined to start a new chapter, and from Terenia Edwards as his gung-ho help-meet.
Though this doesn’t mark any great departure for him, it’s still stirring to see Scarborough’s most valiant theatrical trouper slogging on, refusing to yield to battle fatigue.
‘Staying in his serio-comic zone of marital friction, Ayckbourn’s women emerge as the stronger types’ ‘The toy railway is poignantly emblematic of comradely boyhood that can no longer be reached’
Until Oct 3. Tickets: 01723 370541; sjt.uk.com