Britain’s middle class combines comedy and drama

Press, 15 January 1986, Page 17

Britain’s middle class combines comedy and drama

As a dramatist of the quirks of human nature, Alan Ayckbourn is also a student of theatrical technique, and his work continues to be steadily and excitingly durable. Despite being so prolific, Ayckbourn confounds his detractors by maintaining his consistently high quality, perhaps because he writes about the people he knows best — the British middle class. J. C. TREWIN, drama critic of the “Illustrated London News,” writes:

Though it is wrong to judge quality by quantity, 46-year-old Alan Ayckbourn has written some 40 plays and has had more than half of them acted successfully in London. If the figures are approximate, that is because a recount is always in progress: there has not been a more prolific English dramatist in our day. His latest comedy, “A Chorus of Disapproval,” on the Olivier stage of the National Theatre, has shown that, if anything, he is developing his close investigation of what has been called “middle class naturalism.” No other writer we know has managed to get comic and dramatic effects in just his way. On one level, the new piece is a view of amateur operatics in the provinces. Ayckbourn has owed much to a regional theatre background to which he is entirely loyal. In his early days he worked for a while in Stoke-on-Trent in the English midlands. Now for a long time he has directed a repertory theatre-in-the-round at Scarborough, in north-east England, where, regularly, he puts on his own plays and burnishes them before they get down to London. By then he has usually one or two new productions in hand — his invention is ceaseless. The fact that he is so prolific has led in some quarters — though not, on the whole, very seriously — to what he might call a chorus of disapproval. The suggestion is that no man who does so much can be consistent; and why does he not write about types more theatrically fashionable than the middle class to which, endearingly, he sticks?

The answers are that, in spite of an occasional comedy slightly below average, Ayckbourn’s plays keep an astonishing level, and he writes, as he insists, about the people he knows best. There is still a good deal to say. He has been described as "a laughing’surgeon”: we realise more and moire that he is looking beyond the" bounds of comedy as he expresses foibles and records obsessions.

“A Chorus of Disapproval” deals with a shy young widower (acted at the National by Bob Peck) who is new to a northern town and ready to make friends. The local amateur operatic society seems as good a place as any; but he is a man, anxious to please, who can never say no. That trait (or failing), while it takes him (to his surprise) from a tiny part in “The Beggar’s Opera” to Captain Macheath himself, involves him at the same time in the most embarrassing social problems. At the end it appears that for business reasons he may soon be leaving the town, and that no doubt will be the best thing that can happen to him. Though the play is often extremely funny — especially when the society’s director (Michael Gambon) is in full storm — it does keep an underlying seriousness that can leave a hint of quinine on the tongue. We never know what Ayckbourn will try next. From his earliest days he has experimented, though

sometimes his people are so accurately observed that we have not been sure of this in performance. Surprisingly, when we look back, his first piece in London was a failure. It had worked splendidly in the adventurous repertory theatre at Stoke-on-Trent, but at the Arts Theatre, London, during the summer of 1964, nobody quite knew how to take it. Entitled “Mr Whatnot,” and about a piano. tuner summoned professionally to an English country house week-end party, nearly all of it was devised in mime and sound effects.

Now, when we are so familiar with Ayckbourn, the audacity of the idea might not rouse the slightest astonishment. But it was certainly not for the West End stage of 1964, and its author did not become part of the London scene for another three years. Then “Relatively Speaking,” a tangle of prolonged misunderstandings wittily contrived in speech and situation, suggested to the West End (“Mr Whatnot” forgotten) that a new dramatist had indeed arrived. It may be wistfulness that has caused Ayckbourn, when he is now a National figure in two senses, to use in “A Chorus of Disapproval” an imaginary place name, Pendon, that appears in both “Relatively Speaking” and his committee room play, “Ten Times Table.” His guiding plan as a dramatist has been to set himself a more-or-less insoluble theatrical problem and then to solve it, while never for a moment losing sight of his people’s humanity. He does not deal is stereotypes. That is one reason why he is unlikely to have many imitators. Besides knowing intimately the people he creates, he is determined to be a major technician.

Maybe he has never achieved anything harder than “How the Other Half Loves” which reached London in 1970, ran for nearly 900 performances, and managed to stage possibly the most complex dinner party scene the theatre has known: actually two dinner-parties on successive evenings, in different households, with the same pair of guests, but presented simultaneously. Often, as you will gather, it is difficult to state what Ayckbourn is attempting, but his ideas do come off in performance, and we must bear in mind that his people in the oddest situations are not simply the dummies of a theatrical exercise.

“How the Other Half Loves” is possibly the title best remembered.

Ayckbourn has never been particularly good at titles and, in retrospect, as the plays mount up we have to ask anxiously what happened in this or the other. “Ten Times Table” is all right. That is about a pageant organising committee at perpetual cross-purposes. We know “The Norman Conquests” because it is a trilogy describing a country week-end, with a principal figure called Norman, who is an uncontrollably amorous assistant librarian. “Absurd Person Singular” is the narrative played on three consecutive Christmas Eves in three kitchens. “Bedroom Farce” is confined to three bedrooms that are spread out across the stage. Still there is a crowd of others: “Joking Apart,” “Just Between Ourselves,” “Intimate Exchanges” (a sustained- run of variations on a theme, so that you may be unsure which play of many possibles you will see), “Absent Friends,” “Taking "Steps,” “Sisterly Feelings,” “Way Upstream” (a cabin-cruiser on the Thames), and so on and on. If these titles ten to telescope in the memory, in the theatre — which is what matters — they are unexpected, thoroughly clear and often almost uncomfortably real when Ayckbourn uncovers the truth beneath his glaze of comedy. As we have seen, yet again in “A Chorus of Disapproval,” he is as much a dramatist of the quirks of human nature as he is a student of technique, and his work continues to be steadily and excitingly durable.

Copyright — London Press Service.