Ayckbourn is the gift that keeps on giving
Birthdays Past, Birthdays Present
The late Ken Dodd kept going and going. The same applies to that theatrical Stakhanovite Sir Alan Ayckbourn. This is a man too busy to let retirement come calling, who survived a stroke in 2006 and carried on working. Having turned 80 in April, he’s now premiering the aptly titled and themed Birthdays Past, Birthdays
Present – his 83rd play staged at the theatre he has made his base since the Fifties, running it between 1972 and 2009: the Stephen Joseph in Scarborough.
Never mind that big new BBC One sitcom, Ayckbourn put the pretty Yorkshire coastal resort on the map yonks ago. As well as outstripping every other major playwright of the post-war age in terms of output, no playwright of recent times has enjoyed such a productive relationship with one provincial town.
Not, it should be said, that Ayckbourn is explicitly interested in detailing the lives of those he dwells among, capturing the qualities of this curiously out on a limb locale. But implicitly, in his need to catch the fickle interest of passing holidaymakers and ensure he woos a regular, loyal audience, there has been an artistic symbiosis between himself and the world he has rooted himself in.
His concern is with the travails of ordinary life, the minutiae of domestic relationships, the melancholy lurking in the everyday, that sadness tempered by mirth. The kit and caboodle of experience often comes wrapped in a neat theatrical conceit that asks big “ifs” about life choices.
At its best the formula – if one can dare call it that – achieves a Chekhovian richness, work that will stand good in the canon. On a more middling night, though, the balancing act (of being pleasing as well as home truth-telling) can achieve a cancellingout effect of blandness, losing its commercial lustre too.
That, I’m afraid to report, is the net-effect of this latest opus, which passes the time amiably and amusingly enough, and passes it backwards – rolling from an 80th birthday bash across 38 years, spanning two generations and four celebrations. Ayckbourn once starred as the fugitive Stanley in Pinter’s early masterpiece The Birthday Party, and in its anticlockwise scheme, this bears comparison with Pinter’s Betrayal. But the potential for darkness is mislaid amid a suburban comedy of male diffidence and chronic misunderstanding.
For reasons that become apparent as the evening wears on, ex-coach driver Micky (Russell Dixon) – whose birthday bash starts the action – has become fixated with the idea that his dull, bookkeeper son Adrian (Jamie Baughan) is a raging Lothario behind his mild-mannered exterior. In a fun, toe-curling scene, Micky and wife Meg (a nicely over-concerned Jemma Churchill) try to warn their middleaged boy’s new mousy girlfriend. But the nervously giggling visitor, a chaste churchgoer called Grace, thrills to the prospect. All credit to Ayckbourn: content-wise, he’s not doing prim, pipe and slippers fare.
Grace and three other women from Adrian’s past (called Faith, Hope and Charity) prove a gift for actress (and name to watch) Naomi Petersen, who metamorphoses into an unfulfilled wife, a spirited cockney call girl, and the teenage friend of Adrian’s sister who played a pivotal role at the start of his life giving him his unlikely reputation for prowess.
Ayckbourn has called this a present to himself – and there’s a slightly hollow rattle to it. Still he’s allowed this indulgence, which affirms (he directs too) that he has not lost his faculties. We should pause for applause. Apparently, he has already scripted three further plays. So, although this divertissement winds up at the “beginning”, there’s no end yet in sight for the birthday Bard of Scarborough.