Veronica Lee profiles the playwright as the Old Vic revives his best-known work
Alan Ayckbourn, so theatre lore has it, is the second-most performed British playwright after Shakespeare. So why has he become so unfashionable among theatre cognoscenti?
Partly, it’s his own doing. In 2002, disillusioned by the musical-laden, drama-free territory it had become and despite his many successes there throughout his career, he announced a West End hiatus on his work (only recently ended for a revival of Absurd Person Singular with Jane Horrocks). Plus, he insists on premiering all his new work in his beloved home town of Scarborough. And two of his tropes — complicated plotlines and sets that require pinpoint timing of entrances and exits — might lead some more foolish commentators to describe him as the thinking man’s Ray Cooney.
Mostly, though, it’s because Ayckbourn, 69, is no shockmeister in the style of the late Sarah Kane (third on that list, by the way). Swear words are used minimally (but always to maximum effect when they are), there’s no simulated sex on stage (although it is much talked about by his often lustful and/or frustrated characters), and the only bloodletting on stage is emotional rather than literal. In short, he writes about the lives and loves of the middle classes — and we all know how that plays in lefty luvviedom.
But a major revival of his best-known work, The Norman Conquests, at the Old Vic in London (previewing now and opening 6 October), should serve to remind us why Ayckbourn is one of our greatest living playwrights. So keen was the Old Vic’s artistic director Kevin Spacey to stage the work that he agreed to reconfigure the auditorium into a theatre in the round, like the Library Theatre (now the Stephen Joseph) in Scarborough, for which it was originally written.
The Norman Conquests is a trilogy — Table Manners, Living Together and Round and Round the Garden — designed to be seen either as self-contained pieces, or as one whole work, and concerns the complicated love lives of three couples: Norman and his wife, Ruth; Ruth’s brother Reg and his wife, Sarah; and Ruth and Reg’s younger sister, Annie, and her putative boyfriend, Tom. The action takes place in Annie’s house (and its garden) over one weekend, and is told from a different couple’s viewpoint in a different setting each time.
After a brief run at Scarborough in 1973 and then another at Greenwich Theatre in London, the trilogy became a huge hit in the West End in 1974, with Tom Courtenay as Norman. It made stars of the rest of its previously unknown cast: Michael Gambon, Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith and, later in its 18-month run, Julia McKenzie, and ran on Broadway for seven months.
Norman (played in the Old Vic production by Stephen Mangan, of Green Wing fame) feels it is his duty to keep every woman in his life happy, and the way he thinks a man keeps a woman happy is to lust after her. The trilogy came just a few years after the publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and Norman’s view of women — or perhaps that should be Ayckbourn’s — might be considered hopelessly out of date in 2008. But not so, says Amanda Root, who plays Sarah. ‘Although women’s issues have obviously progressed since it was written,’ she says, ‘gender politics and male/female roles at home and at work are still as potentially fraught with tension today.
‘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.’
Ayckbourn settled in Scarborough after an itinerant life as an actor and stage manager. He was born in London to a novelist mother and musician father and attended Haileybury. While working at the Library Theatre (of which he became artistic director in 1972) he started writing and his first major hit was in 1967 with Relatively Speaking; almost half his plays have been performed either in the West End or at the National Theatre, and many on Broadway. He was knighted in 1997.
The writer had a major stroke in early 2006 but his output is undiminished. His latest play, Life and Beth, was premiered this summer at Scarborough and his current revival of Woman in Mind will be the last of his works performed there before Chris Monks take the helm next year. Monks has commissioned Ayckbourn’s 73rd play, which will be premiered in 2009.
Warchus hopes that the Old Vic production will mark the point where The Norman Conquests is rightly considered a modern classic. ‘These plays are a marvellous snapshot of 1973 but watching them, you are struck by how little has changed.’
And how: the playwright rarely refers to contemporary events in his work, but the trilogy mentions oil prices, a government in trouble, terrorism, dodgy weather patterns and a sinking British economy. Who knew Alan Ayckbourn was a soothsayer?
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