Sir Alan Ayckbourn, one of Britain’s most admired living playwrights, has predicted that live entertainment will be the sector hardest hit and slowest to recover in Britain, with theatres seen as among the least safe environments in which to spend time.
Ayckbourn is watching in sadness as the pandemic crashes down upon the business he made his life’s work. His many plays, hits such as Chorus of Disapproval, The Norman Conquests, Bedroom Farce and Absurd Person Singular, have filled West End theatres with a judicious mix of high comedy and sensitive observation since the early 1970s.
“Theatre is one of the last places that is going to get back to something like normal,” the 81-year-old playwright and director told the Observer this weekend. “It relies precisely on gathering people in one place. That is what it is. A theatre is an intimate space. If you want to catch a germ, then a small theatre built in the round, like the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, the place I’m most associated with, is the perfect place. If you want to have a wonderful theatrical experience, it is a wonderful place for that too, of course.”
In response to an appeal from Paul Robinson, the current artistic director at Scarborough (Ayckbourn himself was 37 years in the hot seat), the playwright has now not only produced a new play for audio broadcast but has gone back to acting after a 56-year break to appear in a cast of two beside his wife, Heather Stoney.
He was happy to help and he had a play, Anno Domino, already waiting on the back-burner, but Ayckbourn holds out little hope for live theatre in the short term.
“People may have gone back to the theatres quickly after plagues and diseases since the Middle Ages, but they didn’t have Netflix then did they? There was not much else to do,” he said.
If there are any chinks of light ahead, then Ayckbourn believes they lie in the direction of public curiosity about hearing fresh voices and seeing something new. “Seeing new work will be very important,” he said. “It is the thing that keeps theatre going. It is lifeblood.”
Although the playwright stepped back from running the venue after suffering a stroke in 2006, he still produces a stream of work for its loyal audiences. This week he was due to be in rehearsals with the cast of another new work, Truth Will Out: “I am missing the process of getting a play ready desperately. I would have been in rehearsal now and was due to have two plays on this season. One old, one new.”
And the theme of that other new play gives cause for some wry laughter. “It is about the collapse of society, but I got the wrong virus,” he said. “Mine was a computer virus that eventually brings down the national grid.”
When the Stephen Joseph Theatre suddenly went dark this spring Robinson asked Ayckbourn to help fill the void by writing a short monologue, but this did not appeal. “Instead I suggested to Paul that Heather and I do a play together here and I saw his eyes light up because the theatre needs anything it can to draw attention to itself now. We need to say we’re still here.” he said.
Anno Domino, Ayckbourn’s 84th play, looks with humour at the impact of a failing marriage and he and Stoney play four different characters each. “It was a play I’d started some years back, but it kept getting gazumped by other plays,” he explained
And it is only Ayckbourn’s history as an all-rounder, doing the sound for all his own shows, that has made the project possible: “I recorded on a fairly basic system, but I could multitrack which was fun and allowed all the voice overlaps. The main trouble we had was differentiating the sound of the characters. I did use pitch control a little on teenagers, but the older couple and the middle-aged people were no problem for us.”
Ayckbourn is perhaps most famous for work set in the domestic or suburban world, something that might seem to make him especially suited to this challenge. After all, his linked 1999 pair of plays House & Garden ran simultaneously on the same night on two stages, with the same actors switching between audiences. But some of the new audio locations are more adventurous and include a restaurant and a cafe. Stoney was also once an actor but stepped back a mere 35 years ago.
“Heather was very sweet and has taken second place, partly because she was sitting next to the author, who was also planning to direct, so I had the advantage. I had also spoken it all out as I wrote, which I usually do,” said Ayckbourn.
But the experience has not persuaded him to return to acting when audiences can be persuaded to take their seats again: “I always enjoyed acting, but one thing I didn’t miss when I stopped was having to go into the theatre in the evening. When I wrote my first play I realised I had the evening free. I went round the corner to the pub instead, but then I got a bit worried about how it might all be going and went in.”
Anno Domino is available for free as an audio play on the Stephen Joseph Theatre website for a month from 25 May.
