Alan Ayckbourn: Few Jokes, Much Comedy

Alan Ayckbourn: Few Jokes, Much Comedy ELMER M. BLISTEIN As The Comedy ofErrors unties all its knots, as it finally reaches a moment of repose after a hectic and bewildering sequence of events, only two members of the dramatis personae are left on stage. They are identical twins, and they have just been reunited after thirty-three or twenty-five or twenty-three years. (Shakespeare is very precise about hours in this play, but he is cavalier in his treatment of years.) These identical twins, servants, have been crucial to the action, and they are the last to leave the stage. Twelve lines before Exeunt, Dromio of Syracuse says to his twin brother from Ephesus, There is a fat friend at your master's house, That kitchen'd me for you today at dinner. (V.i. 414-415) Fine word, "kitchen'd," even though the OED suggests that used as a transitive verb it is obsolete, and so rare that it may even be a hapax legomenon. Dromio is "kitchen'd" only once. The audience and readers of Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular (1972) are kitchened forthree acts of the three-act play on three successive Christmas Eves: first in "SIDNEY and JANE HOPCROFT'S kitchen of their small suburbalI house. Last Christmas"; then in "GEOFFREY and EVA JACKSON'S kitchen in their fourth:floor flat. This Christmas"; finally in "The BREWSTER-WRIGHTS' kitchen. Next Christmas."1 The "Last," the "This," and the "Next"may give us pause for amoment, but the joke - if, indeed, it exists - is a mild one and may safely be disregarded. The setting may not be disregarded. We have all experienced comedies set in drawing rooms, in forests, in fields, in marketplaces, on seacoasts, on beaches, on piers, in bedrooms, in dining rooms, on porches. in gardens, but it took an Alan Ayckbourn to exploit to its fullest the comic potential of the unromantic, practical, even banal kitchen. We should not be surprised. Settings have always been important in Ayckbourn's plays. In Standing Room Only (1961), one of his earliest efforts, Ayckbourn: Few Jokes, Much Comedy 27 the setting is a bus caught in a traffic jam on Shaftesbury Avenue. The time is the early twenty-first century, and the bus has been in the traffic jam so long that the driver's "two grown-up daughters have never known any other home, and indeed he has come to think that the bus's destination board announces his name, Hammersmith, with the letters BRDWY after it being his recommendation from London Transport: 'Best Ruddy Driver We've 'ad Yet' .'" In How the Other Half Loves (1969), the setting and the manipulation of time are far more complex than either the characters or the dialogue. Ayckbourn 's opening stage direction tells us "The CURTAIN rises to reveal two living rooms, partially lit. Not a composite setting but with two rooms contained and overlapping in the same area." 3 The overlap is so arranged that Fiona and Frank Foster and Teresa and Bob Phillips can entertain Mary and William Detweiler at separate dinnerparties on the same stage at the same time. The audience, that is, watches the separate dinner parties taking place simultaneously . Actually, the Foster dinner is on Thursday evening and the Phillips dinner is on Friday evening. No, it is not all done with mirrors and fine wire, although we do expect some legerdemain when the program tells us that Act One, Scene 2 takes place on "Thursday AND Friday Night" (p. 3). The uppercase conjunction simply requires the Detweilers to have swivel chairs that enable them to turn from the Phillips table to the Foster table at will, the playwright's will, for their complicated performance in this scene. In Bedroom Farce (1975), all of the action takes place in three bedrooms which belong to Ernest and Delia, Malcolm and Kate, and Nick and Jan (p. 16I). By means ofcross-fades the audience's attention is drawn to one bedroom or another, but all are in view at all times. Just as another couple is needed to complicate the action in How the Other HalfLoves, so another couple, Trevor and Susannah, Ernest...