It is a startling fact that when Show & Tell opens at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre in early September, it will be Alan Ayckbourn’s 90th play. Talking to the playwright at his home in the city, I discover something even more astonishing: that he has a reservoir of plays still waiting to be produced.
“During Covid,” he says, “I’ve been collecting plays and every year we have a special weekend in Scarborough where I do a reading. Last year it was Truth Will Out, which was about a boy in his bedroom in Barnsley who tries to break into the computer of a girl he likes and inadvertently brings the country to its knees. This year’s reading will be a play called Father of Invention and – given that I’ve already written a new play for full-scale production next year, and have another outlined for 2026 – I think the total will be closer to 100.”
In my early plays the characters were little more than ciphers – all the actors had to do was add water and stir
And if you visit Ayckbourn’s website, which is meticulously maintained by Simon Murgatroyd, you’ll see that classics from the past are still being revived: Bedroom Farce is at the Mill at Sonning Theatre in Reading, and Relatively Speaking opens at the Sheringham Little Theatre in Norfolk later this month. But Ayckbourn’s focus is Show & Tell. Without giving too much away, it’s about a retired senior citizen who hires a company to put on a play – a mini French farce – in his home for himself and his wife.
What drew Ayckbourn to this unlikely subject? “At the moment,” he says, “I’m in a memory or science fiction mode. Last year I wrote a big AI play, Constant Companions, about androids interfering in people’s lives. So this year I decided to write about what has been the love of my life: the theatre. I was reminiscing about how my mentor, Stephen Joseph, used to drive companies around the country in trucks. But I also read about a company that was doing plays in people’s living rooms during lockdown, and I liked the idea of that. I also wanted to write a tragic love story about old age and dementia. But I hope that the play, without being cheesy, is a celebration of the relationship between actors and audiences.”
The play is emphatically not cheesy. It has some surprisingly sharp things to say about the idea of bringing art to the people – often in their workplaces. This is a valuable idea, but according to Ayckbourn it also had its pitfalls. He says: “I remember we brought three David Campton plays to Wellingborough. There was also a group of folksingers who went round the local pubs, turning down the jukebox and singing traditional ballads. This led to a mass exodus and the prospect of this folk group driving their audience from pub to pub.”
He continues: “The Campton plays were bleak plays about nuclear holocaust and the four-minute warning. I said no one would ever come. But while we were completely shunned by the locals, we had busloads of people coming from Hampstead: exactly the kind of audience we were trying to avoid. As Robert Bolt once said, you can’t convince people to accept art unless you make plays they actually want to accept.”
That sounds reactionary, but the 85-year-old’s entire career proves that you can write plays that are both popular and challenging. As Terry Eagleton wrote, he is “our best imaginative analyst of the hilarity of human misfortune”. But I’m fascinated by what he thinks has changed, in his own work and in theatre generally, since his first play was staged at the old Theatre in the Round in Scarborough’s Library Theatre in 1959 when Harold Macmillan was prime minister.
“That play,” he says, “was The Square Cat, which was about a stupid pop singer who fell in love with a foolish woman. It seems horrible now, but it kept me going spiritually and made me my first real money –
30 to be precise – which, given that I was earning less than £10 a week as an actor, was a lot. At a time when Stephen Joseph was doing a lot of serious plays, people would laugh at them too. But as you get older, you get more complex. I admit that in my early plays the characters were little more than numbers: you asked the actors to add water and stir. Now I hope I’ve broadened my curiosity about people and the possibilities of theatre.”
In saying this, Ayckbourn gives a nice example of how plays can change their meaning with shifts in society. He mentions Things We Do for Love, which was first performed in 1997, had a successful West End run with Jane Asher, and was recently revived by Ayckbourn himself.
“One of the problems,” he says, “is domestic violence, and thankfully there is now a much sharper awareness. In the play, there is a fight between the two main characters that starts with the man throwing a scrapbook against a wall, knocking over the shelves that the woman has built. She starts pushing him, he pushes her, all hell breaks loose and they beat each other to a standstill. I told our fight director to make the conflict longer than we expected, because I wanted to bring out the horror. But the point is that the audience that initially laughed at that scene now gets a serious shock.”
If attitudes have changed, so too has theatre technology. Given Ayckbourn’s long-standing addiction to gadgets – as evidenced in plays like Thereforeforward and Comic Potential – I wonder what he thinks of the current obsession with placing cameras and microphones onstage. “I’m a bit of a back-to-basics guy,” he replies. “The strengths of theatre are in characters and stories. The late Mick Hughes used to say to me, ‘Is my lighting telling the story?’ And when I was at the National doing A Chorus of Disapproval, Michael Gambon went around kicking all the floating microphones that were placed at the front of the stage. When someone asked him why, he said, ‘If people can’t be heard, they shouldn’t be on stage.’
“I think when I started out, it was actor-driven theatre, then it became writer-driven theatre, and then it became director-driven theatre – although Stephen Joseph used to say that directors are just there to make tea. Now theatre is increasingly in the hands of technicians. If you walk into an auditorium during the final stages of a musical, you’ll see that the stands are completely occupied by people behind desks who are there to balance the sound, the lighting, everything.”
Looking at theatre in general, Ayckbourn also finds that the financial imperative of co-productions diminishes individuality. “When I was running Stephen Joseph,” he says, “I thought there were three theatres in the area that had a strong voice. One was ours. Then there was John Godber at Hull Truck, who saw life from a working-class perspective. And there was Barrie Rutter at Northern Broadsides, who was a remarkable actor-producer. Both companies visited us, but they were completely different. If I had tried to co-produce with either of them, the result would have been a total hodgepodge.”
Although Ayckbourn is critical of some aspects of modern theatre, he is far from being a grouch. He delights in the wealth of good actors and feels no nostalgia for the old days of weekly rep: he remembers the cast always saying that they had just mastered a play on a Saturday night, and then it was over.
When I play a silly game of asking him who he would invite to an ideal dinner party, he suggests Chekhov and Ibsen, because he wants to discuss the humor in their plays, Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton to talk about their serious approach to comedy, and the French actor Stéphane Audran for her wit and intellect. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Ayckbourn, now approaching a century as a playwright, is that he is still writing vigorously after suffering a stroke in 2006.
“I woke up after the stroke,” he says, “and for the first time since I was 14 or 15, I had no idea for a play. I felt completely empty and abandoned. But I thought, ‘You’ve got a great back catalogue and you can bring the bitches back to life and bore everyone to tears.’ Six or seven weeks later, a tiny idea came and I said to myself, ‘Thank you, God’ – because that’s the one thing you can’t legislate: that initial spark. I started laughing like crazy and although the play I wrote started out as a comedy about gender swaps, it got darker and darker. I slowly got back on my feet.” You could say that creatively, he hasn’t stopped running since then.