Many rank Sir Alan Ayckbourn among the UK’s top playwrights. I do, too, but didn’t always: “Ayckbourn? So suburban middle class; so middle-of-the-road!” What blinded me to the skills I now deeply admire? Partly, prejudice (shameful, but true); partly, this 1974 collection of one-act plays. When first I saw them, back in 1981, they seemed to lack compassion: characters skewered as specimens of isolation served up for our amusement. This impression is amplified today by creakily dated dialogues (nostalgically amusing when menu-related – grapefruit cocktail and maraschino cherry; rousing the audience to vocal indignation at sexist attitudes – a husband refuses to explain his work because his wife “wouldn’t understand”).
Other negatives are a consequence of the form. These one-scene shorts don’t develop depth as longer plays do, even when they share certain strengths: sharp observation, humour, a clever structure – with characters and situations slyly threading from play to play. Ayckbourn himself directs the plays again for the first time in 40 years and his company delivers a tour de force of ensemble playing – five actors in 20 roles. Relationships, though, are simplistic – and so, it seems at first, is the theme of talkers not listening.
The housebound Mother Figure, restricted to the company of children, chivies her next-door neighbours as if they were toddlers. Her absent husband is the loquacious lothario of Drinking Companion, failing to coax “two enchanting young ladies” from hotel bar to bedroom. The bar-room waiter serves two restaurant tables, each occupied by a married couple arguing Between Mouthfuls. We, the audience, can only hear the escalatingly acrimonious exchanges when the waiter is within earshot of one or other table. The conclusion leaves a sour taste but the aural game is deliciously done.
A different aural game is only one of the confusions at Gosforth’s Fete – dodgy amp; loosely connected mic; whispered secrets blared “over four acres of field”. Then comes A Talk in the Park. Five characters: four benches. All want to talk; none wants to listen. A jazz crescendo of unheeded exclamations fades to the final line: “Might as well talk to yourself.”
All of the other pieces gain retrospective depth, reviewed in memory as fables of non-communication culminating in this merry-go-round of monologues. For me, though, it is too late: we have failed to connect.
