Alan Ayckbourn
oldie drama king of the year
The first of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays to achieve worldwide recognition was Relatively Speaking, which opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London in March 1967.
Ayckbourn was then 27 and almost unknown, although his earlier work had already been staged at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where he was established as resident playwright. The original version of Relatively Speaking, under the title Meet My Father, had received its premiere there in 1965. It was then in three acts, but Ayckbourn reduced it to two, so that the piece could be staged with more speed and urgency.
That production, by the veteran actor Nigel Patrick, made a star of Richard Briers, playing the hapless Greg, who pursues his girlfriend Ginny to the countryside, where she is visiting her parents. Or so she says. Greg has discovered another man’s slippers under their bed, and a large bouquet of flowers has been delivered to their flat with no card attached. He is suspicious.
He arrives at Philip and Sheila’s house before Ginny and is immediately convinced that the couple are, indeed, her father and mother. Philip is, in fact, Ginny’s older lover, with whom he was having an affair before he met his wife. The affair has been resumed, and Ginny is now intent on ending it. And that’s just the beginning. There are more complications and misunderstandings to come, as there always are in a play bearing Ayckbourn’s name.
Relatively Speaking was critically acclaimed, but there were those who curbed their enthusiasm by using the word ‘slight’ to indicate that it shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Ayckbourn, for all his deserved success, has had to face more than his share of critical snobbery over the years. He has been compared unfavourably with both Pinter and Stoppard, the flimsiest of whose offerings have been treated with a respect bordering on the reverential. Yet he has, I would contest, a far greater human range than they have – writing, as he does, about ‘ordinary’ men and women, of the kind who might be living next door to you; the kind Philip Larkin accounts for so mercilessly in his great poem Vers de Société.
Sex in Ayckbourn’s (largely suburban) world exerts a sometimes terrifying influence, reducing bankers, solicitors and landscape gardeners to frantic, shrieking wrecks, and their wives or partners or ‘bits on the side’ to perplexed astonishment.
Alan Strachan’s recent, superb revival of How the Other Half Loves emphasised that Ayckbourn’s slightness, even skittishness, is a serious matter. There is real pain in his best plays, because the humour on display never seems manufactured. He doesn’t go in for one-liners or clever puns. He hears, rather, the chillingly daft things people actually say, as when the Hitler-like Mr Featherstone remarks of his hysterical wife in How the Other Half Loves: ‘Do you realise, Mrs Foster, the hours I have put into that woman?’
Ayckbourn is as prolific as Georges Simenon and, in his very different way, just as good. He suffered a stroke in 2006, but is now writing again. He’s that rare thing – a complete man of the theatre who appreciates the often theatrical reality of everyday life.