70 plays and counting ... Alan Ayckbourn by Eamonn McCabe
The standard advice given by doctors to stroke victims is to relax and take it easy. Since recovering from a stroke last year, Alan Ayckbourn's idea of taking it easy has been to direct his 70th play, commence work on his 71st and oversee the New York transfer of Intimate Exchanges, a play which features over 32 hours of dialogue and 16 variant endings. Yet even at a still sprightly 68, it was inevitable that Britain's most-performed living playwright would eventually have to slow down, so the news that he is to step down as artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre after 37 years is not altogether surprising.
Ayckbourn's decision to hand over the reins (a new director is to be appointed to programme the summer 2009 season) marks the passing of an era, though the announcement is not as drastic as it sounds. The playwright is not retiring, nor does he intend to move out of town - it would only be slightly more surprising to hear that the Sphinx was planning to leave Egypt. And, as he intends to continue premiering all his new plays in Scarborough, it will seem business as usual. The Stephen Joseph has always been less of a theatre in the usual sense than a kind of public potting shed where Ayckbourn assembles all his bizarre hobby horses and grand ideas.
Ayckbourn first arrived on the east coast in 1957 as an assistant stage manager for the company founded by Stephen Joseph - the son of publisher Michael Joseph and actress Hermione Gingold, whose radical scheme for a theatre-in-the-round found an unlikely berth in Scarborough's public library. In those days, an assistant stage manager's job included expanding the repertory, and Ayckbourn immediately applied himself to writing myself what he described to me once as "a damn good part in which I came on early and never went off". Joseph apparently responded by saying: "Well done, Ayckers ... If you write a further twenty you might get to be quite good."
After Stephen Joseph's death in 1967, the theatre that had become his life's work was in danger of folding. It was a further four years before Ayckbourn was asked to save the company from extinction. "I was 30, I had some West End successes under my belt and I really didn't need a theatre," he recalled, "but I was the only person who knew Stephen well enough to understand his dream. I thought, if I don't take this, I'll have destroyed Stephen's legacy. I was the heir apparent."
Perhaps the most perturbing aspect of Ayckbourn's decision to stand back is that he has no apparent heir himself. Under his stewardship, the Stephen Joseph Theatre has remained a breeding ground for successive generations of British actors (Michael Gambon, Martin Freeman, Steven Tomkinson, Tamsin Outhwaite - we saw them in Scarborough first) and though the theatre continues to programme new plays other than Ayckbourn's own there has yet to emerge a single writer whose apprenticeship has exclusively been served in Scarborough. Tim Firth perhaps comes closest - his hit Neville's Island was commissioned after Ayckbourn enjoyed a lunchtime show he had produced in the theatre restaurant. But it is hard to imagine anyone as established as Firth wishing to swap a successful film and television career for the hassle of running a theatre.
But perhaps it is ultimately to the good that Ayckbourn should bow out with the future undecided. When the SJT celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2005, there was a special cocktail at the bar known as the Self Destruct - not because its combination of vodka and champagne was particularly lethal, but because Stephen Joseph believed that every theatre needed periodically to self-destruct, re-invent, start again.
The worst thing that could happen is that the theatre becomes a kind of living museum, endlessly curating revivals of the master's work. Stephen Joseph was a visionary, and it will be up to the new director to embody that entrepreneurial spirit. Though it is hard to imagine any newcomer having the tenacity to say: "Sorry, Ayckers, but your new play doesn't quite cut it. Write another twenty, then come and see me again."
