A little Alan Ayckbourn

It was lovely to see quite a few bloggers take up the challenge of A Century of Books, and quite a few of them wanted to check the small print with me. The rules, they asked – is it year of publication or year of translation? Can I count books I’m halfway through? Is this small black cat technically a book?

“Make up your own rules!” I said. “Sure, maybe that cat IS a book! Read it! Read it as much as you like!”

And nowhere has this playing-with-rules become more evident in my own reading decisions than with Alan Ayckbourn. Because I’ve counted the audiobooks I’ve listened to of his plays (with different actors for different characters), where I wouldn’t count a play I saw on stage towards my century. Does it make sense? No, of course not. Are they my rules? Yep, and I’m sticking to them.

I listened to three Ayckbourn plays (well, technically five – more on that in a mo) and I gave up on Henchforward… which was some bizarre dystopian robot thing. Apparently Ayckbourn does dystopian plays now and then, but it’s not my cup of tea and I skipped onto a different play. Btw, I’m using the year of first performance as the date for each play. #MyOwnRules.

The Norman Conquests (1973)

This is actually three different plays, all first performed in 1973 – Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden. I think (?) they’re his most famous plays, and I’ve had a DVD of them since forever that I still haven’t watched. (Fun fact for Good Life fans: Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendal were in the original production. Fun fact for Ever Decreasing Circles fans: Penelope Wilton and Richard Briers are on the DVD, as is Penelope Keith.)

All the plays feature the same characters, and take place on the same evening – the clever conceit is that each play looks at what’s going on in one room/space during the evening – the kitchen, living room, and garden respectively. It’s not quite as clever as Ayckbourn’s Home and Garden, in that the plays can’t be played simultaneously, but it works very well nonetheless – you can see any one of them individually as a self-contained play (though I have my doubts that Round and Round the Garden would be very rewarding done thus), or you can watch all of them and put together the whole picture.

And the plot? Broadly, Norman had been planning to run away with his wife’s sister – for a dirty weekend in (ahem) East Grinstead. Over the course of the evening, the various couples – siblings and their spouses or would-be spouses – shout at each other, flirt with each other, and come to some sort of resolution. It’s all very entertaining, even if it’s rather a stretch to believe that anybody at all would want a relationship with Norman, since he’s selfish, unkind, arrogant, and frequently rather annoying. But the title is brilliant.

Just Between Ourselves (1976)

The play is set over four consecutive birthdays, and features two couples who meet when one of them is thinking about buying the car of the other – though even this is rather up for debate, as the quietly warring husband and wife who come to look at the car can’t even decide if they want a car at all.

This play is all very tautly told, but I can’t remember many specifics… which perhaps tells that the structure of Just Between Ourselves isn’t quite as good as Ayckbourn at his finest. The main male is just as annoying as Norman, though. What is it with Ayckbourn and annoying men who somehow captivate everybody around them?

Man of the Moment (1988)

This one is rather cleverer – it takes place around an episode of a series called ‘Their Paths Crossed’. In this case, the paths crossed 17 years earlier – between the TV personality Vic Parks and a rather hapless man named Doug. I’m not going to tell you how their paths crossed (don’t look at Wikipedia!) just in case you listen yourself, or go and see it performed, because I had a great time guessing until it was revealed.

From the reveal is quite a heartbreaking and heartwarming story about forgiveness, chance, fate, and… well a bit of drama thrown in. Guess what? Vic is another terrible person. A little too terrible at times – it would be a more nuanced story if he weren’t. It might not be a coincidence that my favourite Ayckbourn play so far is Relatively Speaking, in which everyone is (relatively) pleasant.