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Ayckbourn’s unflinching gaze

Veronica Lee

Wednesday, 24th September 2008

Veronica Lee profiles the playwright as the Old Vic revives his best-known work

‘Ayckbourn beautifully captures the complexities of a woman’s social and familial roles, and his female characters stand up to modern scrutiny.’ Certainly, the three female roles — one who stays at home to care for her invalid parent, the other a career woman who has chosen not to have children and the last a stressed mother — all ring true today.

Matthew Warchus, who is directing the Old Vic production, first saw Ayckbourn’s work in Scarborough near where he grew up in North Yorkshire and explains the importance of the Old Vic’s reconfiguration, supported by CQS and the Michael and Dorothy Hintze Foundation. ‘If you take the play out of the round you are obliged to do various things that affect the tension or balance Ayckbourn creates; for example, you have to provide walls with wallpaper or windows, and they suddenly look like old-fashioned box sets.

‘In the round it’s already radical: the actors are on an island and there is a sense of it being a laboratory — and Alan has a merciless gaze. I think he has a deep affection for people that allows him to set his gaze unflinchingly. His work starts off ostensibly about love and marriage, but you are quickly alerted to loss, desolation, sadness and humiliation in his characters. He’s very good at showing the world in sheep’s clothing — and I think some people only see the sheep’s clothing.’

Ayckbourn’s comedic strengths, too, can work against him — he deals in the same inner world of emotional turmoil as Harold Pinter or Edward Albee, but is rarely talked about as being in their company. As Warchus says, ‘His world often appears to be a sitcom in terms of characters and situations, and because it’s premiered in a seaside town’s summer festival, it’s called populist. But there are these pinging moments when you see the poetry in the mundanity, a deep emotion among the laughter.’