Three hours by rail from London and a brisk five-minute walk from the train station lies the artistic home of the playwright who in England is exceeded in popularity only by William Shakespeare.
Alan Ayckbourn, the amiable, articulate, slightly paunchy and pleasantly rumpled man who holds this distinction (judging from the number of productions his plays receive each year), raises an eyebrow and waves aside an imaginary annoyance when he is reminded of this.
“I’ll be more pleased,” he says, “if that holds true 400 years from now, which is about how long Shakespeare has lasted up to now.”
So far, Ayckbourn has lasted about 35 years, since making his professional theater debut as a playwright at age 20 in 1959 and continuing at a cracking pace ever since. At 54, with an amazing 46 plays (including comedies for children) to his credit, he is prolific, successful and, increasingly, respected.
At his commercial peak in the mid-to-late 1970s, it was not uncommon for Ayckbourn to have three, four or even five comedies playing in London’s West End theater district at the same time. Along with a mass audience, he also gradually developed an intellectual following. Alain Resnais, the French film director of the avant-garde “Last Year at Marienbad” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” is an Ayckbourn admirer, for example, and recently released two two-actor movies, “Smoking” and “No Smoking,” based on Ayckbourn’s comedy “Intimate Exchanges.”
Today, as artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre In the Round, housed in a former boys’ grammar school in the seacoast resort town of Scarborough, he writes at least one play a year.
His work method is simple, to hear him talk. “I tend to write very fast,” he explains. “I give myself a month, and for two weeks of that I search around for something that has been ticking up here in my head all year round. The writing itself usually takes a week or less, and it goes even better now that I work on a computer. Heather, the lady I live with, is a good editor; I show her everything I write, and I listen very carefully to her suggestions.”
Once Ayckbourn has finished a play, he directs it as part of the subscription season at his not-for-profit Scarborough theater and, if there’s interest in it from London producers, he transfers it to the West End for a longer run.
Out of this system has come a cornucopia of comic plays, ingeniously constructed and brilliantly peopled, about the vagaries of the contemporary English middle class. These past hits include such long-run comedies as “The Norman Conquests,” “Absurd Person Singular,” “How the Other Half Loves,” “Woman in Mind,” “Absent Friends,” “A Chorus of Disapproval” and “Taking Steps,” all of which have played Chicago theaters in the last few years.
For this season, Ayckbourn had two new plays on the boards in England. “Wildest Dreams,” the latest and darkest in his recent series of dark comedies, played the small Pit theater of the Royal Shakespeare Company in London and has transferred to the RSC’s Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. “Communicating Doors,” a mystery-thriller-science fiction-romance-farce, sold out its month-long run in February in Scarborough and will soon travel to Chicago with the original cast and production team for its May 25-June 25 United States premiere engagement in the Merle Reskin Theatre for the International Theatre Festival of Chicago.
Changing tastes
Once almost a surefire bet for a hit a year in London, Ayckbourn in recent years has felt the pinch of tepid audience response in commercial theaters, and consequently, he says, “I’ve taken flight to the subsidized companies,” such as the RSC and the Royal National Theatre. In the United States, too, aside from the Broadway successes of “Absurd Person Singular” and “Bedroom Farce,” Ayckbourn’s plays have received their American premieres in no-profit ventures such as the Houston Alley Theatre, the Cleveland Play House, the Arena Stage of Washington, D.C. (where his two-part “The Revengers’ Comedies” opens April 16) and, soon, the International Theatre Festival here.
Though such projects sometimes keep him away from Scarborough, the Stephen Joseph, named after the late director-manager who founded the theater and gave Ayckbourn his entry into professional theater, is the playwright’s anchor home.
“It’s the place that gives me the right to fail,” he says, acknowledging its importance as a showcase for his new work.
Unless London and U.S. premieres require him to be gone for long periods, Ayckbourn directs about half of the eight or nine plays presented each season at the Stephen Joseph. He is a constant presence in all affairs of the theater’s small staff, including the plans to move to larger quarters in 1995; and, as he mingles with the pre-show crowd in the tiny lobby bar of the theater, he truly seems to be playing the role of the squire of Scarborough, greeting and chatting it up with the teenagers, dating couples, families and senior citizens who crowd into the 300-seat arena auditorium.
In a corner of the theater’s lobby hangs a picture of a very youthful Ayckbourn as he appeared in 1959 in the title role of “The Square Cat,” his first comedy, about a rock ‘n’ roll star who is a homebody at heart. He received 42 pounds for it, which, he recalls, was “the most money I had ever made in my life.”
In 1967, with the opening of his romantic comedy “Relatively Speaking” in London, followed by another success in 1970 with “How the Other Half Loves” (now in revival in Chicago by the off-Loop company Profiles Performance Ensemble), he became a major player in London theater, his intricately structured and ingeniously plotted comedies scoring hit after hit.
Comedies getting darker
“His craft is brilliant,” says Ina Marlowe, who, as artistic director of Chicago’s Touchstone Theatre, has picked an Ayckbourn comedy as part of her subscription series for two seasons in a row. “When I’m directing his plays, it’s like I’m following a very complex story line in which every detail is perfectly put in place.”
As time went on, however, the irony, rue and even bitterness that had worked its ways into Ayckbourn comedies satirizing middle-class life began to surface in larger quantities. In “Wildest Dreams,” for example, the domestic comedy involves battered wives, incest, debilitating illness and insanity, which is fairly dark material for a man who originally had made his name in light comedy.
As the comedies grew darker, and as critics began to discover deeper meanings in his work, Ayckbourn’s commercial runs in London grew shorter.
“The middle ground is gone in the West End,” Ayckbourn mourns. “Unless the critics are 100 percent in saying this is wonderful, you don’t have a chance for a good run. The less-than-perfect play just doesn’t get done anymore.”
At the same time, noting a shift in taste in his audiences, he says, “I sensed they wanted something lighter than the comparatively dark work I was writing. They wanted to feel that they’ve experienced something challenging, but they also expected something that’s very entertaining.”
“Communicating Doors,” which Ayckbourn believes is “very different from anything I’ve ever written before,” is his attempt to lighten up a little, providing his audience with his customary skill in conjuring up amusing situations and inventive stagecraft, but avoiding the darkest shadows of his most recent plays.
Suspense, farce and drama
Ayckbourn describes the new comedy as “a time travel play, with bits of Stephen King, Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock in it.” Set in a London hotel room with a magical communicating door that allows people passing through it to skip 20 years backward and 20 years forward, it’s also a suspense thriller, a bedroom farce and a warm-hearted family drama.
Originally Ayckbourn had intended to write a comedy he called “Private Fears in Public Places,” which took place in an airport, but neither that nor another comedy on which he had started work turned out well, so, Ayckbourn relates, “From the debris emerged a third idea, which turned out to be `Communicating Doors.’ “
Jane Nicholl Sahlins, the International Theatre Festival’s executive director, had been trying to bring Ayckbourn’s company to Chicago for several years, and when he agreed to make the move here with the U.S. premiere of a new play, she eagerly signed him for the 1994 festival.
The six-person cast and play will be the same. “I found early on in my writing,” Ayckbourn says, “that no matter how much I worked on a play, it never got better, just fussier.
“I don’t mean to say that I’m sloppy, but once it’s over and written, I’m eager to start on a new play. Let’s get on to the next one!”
