Word: ayckbourn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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AUTHOR: ALAN AYCKBOURN...
...these people see themselves as morally normal -- and playwright Alan Ayckbourn, Britain's leading comedist, plainly thinks they are. Although the corruption depicted in A Small Family Business embraces fraud, the Mafia and murder, it takes place in bland, beige, suburban houses where the residents are preoccupied with recipes, hemlines and their dogs. And while the accents are recognizably British, the decor and, by implication, the bad behavior would seem right at home in Middle America...
...Jake Weber, in no way call to mind the U.S. style of mafiosi. And in the pivotal role of Jack, Brian Murray is a tower of Jell-O, reeking of insincerity from his entry, peevish rather than apocalyptic in uprooting family scandal. Director Lynne Meadow, who vastly improved on Ayckbourn's staging of his best play, Woman in Mind, here reduces a cry of outrage to an amiable snigger. The haunting final image, of the adolescent daughter frozen in narcotic guilt, becomes a mere echo of a deeper work that is otherwise nowhere to be seen...
...only six straight plays are on offer at the moment -- three revivals, an Irish import, two holdovers from last season and nothing new. In London, however, it is the centerpiece of a stage scene abruptly aquiver after a couple of years of doldrums. New plays by David Hare, Alan Ayckbourn, Hugh Whitemore and Timberlake Wertenbaker have been running. Still to come this month are a one- act from Harold Pinter and Alan Bennett's The Madness of George...
...Ayckbourn and Simon are often compared because they are prolific (27 plays for Simon, 40-plus for Ayckbourn), they write cinematically physical comedy and, like some wines, they don't seem to travel. Simon is known in Britain mostly for films of his plays; the British Ayckbourn is staged in the U.S., but rarely in major venues. The vital thing they share is a determination to push comedy toward its mainstream limits. Absent Friends, from 1974, prefigures later and even darker works, too many not yet seen in the U.S. Lynne Meadow, who directed Woman in Mind better than Ayckbourn...