Conversations with Ayckbourn by Ian Watson (review)

114 Book Reviews IAN WATSON. Conversations with Ayckbourn. London: Macdonald 1981. Pp. 189. illustrated. £8.95. Failed businesses, failed maniages, mental breakdowns and death by drowning - these quiet horrors fonn the basisofBritain'sdarkest comedies since the plays ofShakespeare. Yet the work ofAlan Ayckbouro, Britain's most prolific and popularplaywright, has not been subjected to serious critical scrutiny. Perhaps the reason - according to Ian Watson, a free-Jance journalist and arts administrator who has taken the first steps toward correcting the situation - lies in the impossibility of pigeonholing Ayckboum's work. Pinter is menacing, Orton is anarchic, Bond is politically committed and Stoppard is a word-juggler extraordinaire, but Ayckboum has not yet been forced to extricate himself from the added pressures of artificial labels. As a result, a critic might possibly find elements ofthe Pinteresque, the Ortonian, the Bonded and the Stoppardian in a body of work which remains recognizably that of Ayckboum - no adjective needed - in which the tribal rituals of the English middle class are mercilessly dissected with outrageous humor and breathtaking stagecraft. In some shorter earlier pieges as well as a brief section of his current book, Watson demonstrates that he may very well be the one to take on thejob of revealing to the world the true worth of Ayckboum's too lightly regarded canon, but he has a different purpose in mind here. In a series of taped interviews, Watson questions Ayckboum about his background, his schooling. his theatrical apprenticeship as assistant stage manager and actor, and his eventual development as dramatist and director. Ayckboum was fortunate from the beginning. His mother, a successful women's magazine short-story writer, encouraged his own early pecking away at the typewriter. A schoolmaster at Haileybury recognized his passion for theatrics and urged him on as actor, even helped him to his first job with Donald Wolfit's company at the Edinburgh Festival. From there Ayckboum moved from rep to rep, eventually finding his way to Stephen Joseph's theater-in-the-round in Scarborough, Yorkshire, as ASM. What seemed especially appealing at the time was that the lack of a proscenium stage meant a minimum of scenery to shift and store. But Ayckboum was most fortunate, he tells Watson, in coming under the tutelage of the fanatical Joseph, who believed that everyone in the company ought to be familiar with every aspect oftheater- not only to be able to act, but to know how to work the lights and the sound, even to be able to write a play on the side. And with the impetus ofcreating good parts for himself, that is exactly what Ayckbourn found himself doing. Soon Ayckhourn the actor lost ground to Ayckboum the dramatist, and after Joseph's death he found himselfin the unique position ofrunning a company which relied on him not merely to direct the productions but to write at least one new playa year as well. Not since Shakespeare, perhaps, has a dramatist worked under such favorable conditions, for Ayckboum is working with an excellent company which has been well received on occasion by the London critics, in an in-the-round theater which challenges his ingenuity to the full, for an audience of locals and holiday-makers at Yorkshire's seaside resort which is as much a microcosm as was Shakespeare's venue. After twenty-five years in Scarborough, Ayckboum is still thriving, and what is more important, still developing. Watson himself once worked at the Scarborough theater as "a bloody useless stage manager," according to Ayckboum. and their longstanding acquaintance has enabled the interviewer to evoke from his subject a relaxed humor, a telling candor and even, in a Book Reviews 115 discussion of the possibility that the Scarborough theater company will not outlast its writer~director, a certain justified arrogance. Ayckhoum adds hilarious tales to the growing Wolfit mythology but admits having learned something useful from him: "that theatre is show business." His account of the opening night of How the Other HalfLoves in Palm Beach, Florida, during which a serving trolley rolled off the raked stage covering "two of the most beautiful American people" with frigadella, and Phil Silvers required prompting from the audience, is...