Winter Passages by Robert Brustein

Author:Robert Brustein [Brustein, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Theater, History & Criticism, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Literary Collections, Essays
ISBN: 9781412855228
Google: H5eqBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2014-10-07T01:30:54+00:00

Alan Ayckbourn

Alan Ayckbourn is one of the most complete men of the theatre since Molière. Best known as a playwright, he has also functioned as a director, actor, stage manager, and sound designer, and let us not forget his tenure as artistic director of a major theatre in Scarborough. Not only does he discharge a large number of theatrical functions, he has also written an enormous number of plays for stage, radio, and children’s theatre—over a hundred in fact—making him one of the most prolific dramatists since Lope de Vega (who wrote over eighteen hundred).

Ayckbourn continues that line of British farceurs that on stage has included Benn Levy and Ben Travers and Frederick Lonsdale and that later found its way into radio and TV in such entertainments as The Goon Show and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Ayckbourn himself is very conscious of the tradition in which he is writing. He numbers Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward among his influences and, if his adaptation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s A Trip to Scarborough is any indication, can even see his way back to the great Irish farce masters of the eighteenth century, not only the precocious Richardson but the good-hearted Oliver Goldsmith as well.

Where his work departs from theirs, and seems more akin to such contemporary farces as Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, is in the almost geometric nature of the plotting. His plays are nothing if not well-made. They would have impressed an architectural engineer. He writes works with two possible endings (Intimate Exchanges) and in three different time periods (A Trip to Scarborough). In How the Other Half Loves, he throws two different dinner parties on stage simultaneously, though they take place on two different evenings. In The Norman Conquests, he gives us three plays revolving around the same action, each occurring simultaneously in three different locations. And in Bedroom Farce, he brings on stage three separate bedrooms, all at the same time, where three (later four) actions are being performed before the audience simultaneously.

Perhaps the most intricate of these mechanisms is his more recent House and Garde. The evening is composed of two complete plays, both based on a stunt—namely that the same characters (and actors) appear in the two different actions, though performing in separate theatres. This results in a merry romp between the spaces by actors who have as much trouble catching their breath as remembering their lines. They are devoted to making certain that both plays take exactly two-and-one-half hours to perform. One can almost hear the metronome ticking.

This kind of theatrical approach has the potential to start a spectator ruminating about how to walk out of both plays simultaneously. As sometimes happens in Ayckbourn’s more mechanical inventions, the gimmick is forced to do the work of the imagination. As for the content, Kenneth Tynan once wrote a piece called “The Lost Art of Bad Drama,” in which he imagined a generic “Loamshire Play,” where

at no point may the plot or characters make more than a superficial contact with reality.

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