Interview with Alan Ayckbourn London, 30 August 1991

Interview with Alan Ayckbourn London, 30 August 1991 Gerhard Schulte Alan Ayckbourn writes and directs his plays for the regular season of the Stephen Joseph Theatre-in-the-Round in Scarborough, Yorkshire. After the repertory run in Scarborough, he usually leaves his post as artistic director for a few weeks to direct the London production. When I met with Ayckbourn during the last week of August 1991, he had started rehearsals for Michael Codron's West End production of The Revengers' Comedies, and his latest play, Wildest Dreams, was in repertory in his Yorkshire theatre. The following conversation took place in his flat in London on August 30, 1991. GERHARD SCHULTE: The first question is rather general, concerning the use of space and time in your plays, in your sets particularly. How do you write those scenes? ALAN AYCKBOURN: The principle I work on is always that any play requires a meeting of several ideas, not necessarily overlapping, in order to spark each other. I will have, for instance, a theme which I want to write about and I will then look probably for characters, a human center to it, but I'm still not happy until I've got a rather unusual setting, something usually visual, sometimes a device that will lock the two together. I work in the magical threes, so I try and find at least three ideas, which, somehow, will complement each other and have enough friction to create drama, really. And often, with a play like Way Upstream , the water didn't come first but the idea of the nature of leadership, of how we'll follow anyone who is strong enough, who apparently knows where they're going. It could have been a rather sullen and portentous play, but putting it on the water with a family struggling with the vicissitudes of living on a rented cabin cruiser made the play visual and funny because there's a lot of funny things happening on rivers, but it also made the point by twisting it into the fantastic or the realms of fantasy. So, each play or approach has another way. I couldn't actually say, there is this system of working. The new play, Wildest Dreams, is the extreme use of overlapping action: there are three sets next to each other but I carry on action in all three simultaneously a lot of the time and, it's important that all the people in those various areas know what's 21 22 Gerhard Schulte happening in the other areas, even though they're not, obviously, watching. Provided the play is well directed, well blocked and well focused, the audience know what's going on, they know the rhythms. SCHULTE: How does the audience take in this multitude of plot lines. Sequential , that's normal, but when action is simultaneous, how much can they take? AYCKBOURN: It's much higher than a lot of people give credit for. I've spent my life, I suppose, finding how greatly we underestimate audiences a lot of the time and how intelligent a group of people can be, a disparate group of not particularly even theatre-going people—in Scarborough certainly not—who come in, sit down, and can, if asked, respond amazingly to, complex multihappenings ... I mean, Taking Steps is a very difficult play to describe to people, they say, "Oh no, I'll never understand that"—but when you see it, people understand the game, they enjoy it-you know, when plaster falls from the ceiling onto the heads of two characters who are standing next to a third character who has apparently brought the plaster down, and the audience laughs—you know they've understood the conceit. You realize you've got to play sort of three-dimensional chess, a visual game, which also is very important to me.... That's why I'm rather against a literary view of the work, which never allows it to be seen visually because I do think that many of our greatest plays have vast areas that are not complete unless you see them. To assume that, in Shakespeare for instance, the text is everything is nonsense. The...