Alan Ayckbourn: from farce to fierce dystopian epic

I know how The Divide differs from most of Ayckbourn’s other plays because I saw its first public performance almost two years ago in a one-off staged reading at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Ayckbourn’s adoptive Scarborough. It struck me, for all its oddness and the incompleteness of the staging, as Ayckbourn’s most richly imagined work in years. So he isn’t jumping on any dystopian feminist bandwagons, but what brought about such a change of gear?

“It began,” says Ayckbourn, 78, reclining on a sofa at his home in Scarborough, “by me saying that you have really got to get out of this cosy routine you are in. And I suspect cosy routines. I always try to do something in every play, something to scare myself. But I thought, ‘I think I need a bit more of a scare this year.’ ”

He doesn’t know exactly where the idea of a plague and divided sexes came from. He does know that he wanted to write something that, for once, he didn’t know how to stage. “So I wrote ‘waterfall’ and ‘bottomless pool’ and a village full of characters that no theatre I work with could possibly afford.” He also wanted something that would click more with a younger audience than usual. And he saw science fiction, an enthusiasm since he was a boy, as his bridge between the generations.

“One can’t understand a word the younger generation are saying now,” he says. “They talk in absolute gibberish. But why should one? My parents didn’t understand what I was saying. I wanted something that could talk to them, though. I wanted to make the playing field flat enough to say: ‘These are the rules and we have all got to play by them.’ In this case we make a world in which women are infectious and men are vulnerable and let’s take it from there. And also there is a nice satirical edge in it that inverts everything that is normal. Heterosexuality becomes the abnormality.”

So far so good: Ayckbourn’s 17-year-old granddaughter, who has been studying The Handmaid’s Tale at school, has declared The Divide her favourite play of his.

He hasn’t seen the new Handmaid’s Tale yet, although he read the book and saw the film version in the 1980s: “I don’t watch too much television when I’m directing. I know that’s another strand to this feminist-future stuff. But I wanted to have a go too. And I found it fascinating to assume the personality of a pubescent girl growing up from eight years old to 17. It’s my ultimate woman play, really. I enjoyed being the girls.” He has seen the Hunger Games films; he loved the first one, but thinks they get “progressively less interesting” after that.

Ayckbourn plans to get The Divide published as a book, as a series of diary extracts in different fonts and different handwriting for the reader to piece together the narrative, just as a theatre audience must. In fact, when he introduced the 2015 performances he announced that this would probably be its only outing. “It will never be repeated again,” he told us. “It’s too difficult.” Yet in the audience that day was Annabel Bolton, an associate director at the Old Vic, who decided she fancied having a go.

Ayckbourn will find out what she has done when he takes a Saturday off in August to go to see it. The Divide is his first new show for decades that he has allowed someone else to direct. “I feel quite sick about it, really, I’m such a control freak, but it will be good for me.” He is, however, busy directing three other shows this year. In Scarborough he has just opened his revival of his farce Taking Steps. He opens A Brief History of Women, in September. Then he goes to the Old Laundry Theatre in the Lake District to revive By Jeeves, the PG Wodehouse musical he wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

There is more to come. The Divide, he says, acted on him “like Andrews Liver Salts: it cleared out my system. I came back to writing with fresh enjoyment”. Last winter he also wrote a police procedural called A Case of Detectives, which would have become play No 82 until he decided to scrap it. Now he has recycled bits of it for another new play, Better Off Dead, the official No 82, about a man who reads his own obituary. He wrote the play this spring and expects to stage it next summer.

He tells me all this quite jovially, as is his way, but wasn’t it quite a big deal to junk a whole play for the first time? “There are ideas you commit to,” he says, philosophically, “and then they blow up in your face. My advice from [his former literary agent] Peggy Ramsay would be: ‘Don’t cling on to an idea for very long, darling. If it doesn’t seem to work, just move on.’ ”

Ayckbourn can’t move as freely as he did before his stroke in February 2006, yet he keeps pushing forward. He only content when he’s working. “I’ve only got two modes. One is directing mode, the other is writing mode, and I am hell on earth when I am waiting for them to start” He also likes the sense of security that comes from always having a new play in his back pocket. Even in the 1970s he enjoyed attending the opening night of one of his plays in London knowing that, hit or flop, he had another ready to go. “The ideas, touch wood, are still coming, but there is that fear. I am writing past my sell-by date now. It’s play number 82.”

Play number 81, A Brief History of Women, may not prove to be a game-changer like The Divide, yet it is still structured differently from anything Ayckbourn has done before. It is set in one house with a hero who ages in 20-year bursts as the house goes from being a posh country home in the 1920s, to a girl’s school in the 1940s, to an arts centre in the 1960s, to a hotel in the 1980s. And we see how the hero, like Ayckbourn, was shaped by the women in his life.

Ayckbourn claims not to have many male friends. “Maybe one or two. I’m never blissfully happy in the company of a group of guys, talking about car engines.” He has lived with his second wife, Heather Stoney, since 1971. His mother, Irene, a writer, largely raised him on her own after splitting from his straying father, Horace, a lead violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra. So he calls A Brief History “semi-autobiographical”: not a label he often attaches to things he writes.

“I am conscious of drawing on my own memories much more than I used to, which may be a result of age. Or maybe I have just chipped away most of the stuff I have seen in my life, and I am hacking away at me now.” So is this why he hasn’t portrayed his childhood directly in a play or written a memoir? Because he wants to be able to keep excavating those memories? “Yes. That and refusing to be psychoanalysed. I want the raw materials to stay intact.”

His childhood, he says, was spent mainly in the company of women. “I had an absentee father. My mother was very antagonistic about men until she decided to marry the bank manager [his stepfather, Cecil Pye], but she also had a lot of female friends, trendy journalist types. They used to scream with laughter and I used to sit and listen to them.”

After that, being sent to boarding school at Haileybury proved a shock. “At the age of 12 women were suddenly withdrawn. And after I left school suddenly I was in a sweetie shop and they opened the doors and I married the first one I met. Had two children with her, then I realised my mistake.” He laughs ruefully, suggests that things are “quite amicable” with his first wife, Christine, who still sometimes comes to stay at Christmas.

Cosy or not, Ayckbourn’s routine — writing in the winter, directing in the summer, swimming in his swimming pool most mornings, leading rehearsals in a converted barn next to his living room — keeps him too busy to sit back and contemplate his reputation, his legacy: “I prefer just to get on with the next one.” Other people keep reviving his stuff too — a Norman Conquests in Chichester this September, say — even if, disappointingly, he admits there is no evidence to support the much-quoted statistic that he is the world’s most-performed playwright after Shakespeare.

They say that you can never find Shakespeare in the Bard’s plays, but can you find Ayckbourn in Ayckbourn’s? He says there’s a bit of him in Soween, his heroine in The Divide, an adolescent would-be writer brought up in a world of segregated sexes. Then again, there’s also a bit of him in Roland, the old drunk in Taking Steps. Oh, and also in Tristan, the nervous solicitor from the same play who mangles his words. His cast suggested as much to him in rehearsals the other day. “So I just dodge that one, I think. Everyone is aspects of me. I exploit weaknesses in myself. There are little bits of me strewn all over the place.”
The Divide is at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh (0131 473 2000), August 8-20; Old Vic, London SE1 (0844 871 7628), January 30-February 10. Taking Steps is at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough (01723 370541), to October 5. A Brief History of Women is at the Stephen Joseph Theatre September 1-October 7. The Norman Conquests is at the Festival Theatre, Chichester (01243 781312), September 18-October 28. By Jeeves is at the Laundry Theatre, Bowness-on-Windermere (015394 40872), October 6-November 4