Who were the greatest political dramatists of the 1980s? David Hare, certainly. Tony Kushner, probably. Alan Ayckbourn - are you kidding?
Actually, this is not meant in jest. In the late 1980s, Ayckbourn took a two-year sabbatical from Scarborough to form an ensemble company at the National Theatre, and furnished it with a vast drama every bit as ambitious as the David Hare trilogy or Angels in America. So vast, in fact, that it has scarcely been seen or heard of since.
Ayckbourn used his stint at the National as an opportunity to cut loose from his usual restraints of small casts and tight budgets, and to realise his ambition of slicing a two-storey house in half. A Small Family Business does not require a set so much as a chunk of real estate, and employs a huge cast to inhabit it.
Ian Brown's spectacular revival is to be prized both for its rarity and as definitive proof that Ayckbourn is as capable of filling a broad political canvas as any of his contemporaries. A Small Family Business is one of the most devastating critiques of Thatcherite free market enterprise ever written, yet Ayckbourn characteristically paints the bigger picture by concentrating on the finest detail.
The play charts the implosion of the McCracken family, initially presented as an unimpeachably hard-working, close-knit furniture-making enterprise. But when Jack McCracken takes up the managing directorship full of hubristic talk about new brooms and clean slates, he is forced to encounter grubby, festering corners of the household he never knew existed.
Ayckbourn probes the grey area in which harmless fiddling becomes serious fraud; and, in taking an extended family as the focus of his investigation, presents a pointedly apt metaphor for society at large.
Every one of the individual performances is priceless, though special credit has to go to Gerard Murphy's credulous Jack, whose high moral standpoint seems to be born at first of naivety and finally of mendacity. Mrs Thatcher infamously stated that there is no society, only families. Most of them, Ayckbourn sourly observes, rather like the McCrackens.
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