Word: ayckbourn
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British playwright Alan Ayckbourn has long been the theater's champion daredevil, a man who never saw a stage stunt he wouldn't tackle. One of his early works, The Norman Conquests, was a cycle of three plays that recounted the events of a weekend from three different parts of the same house. One Ayckbourn play moves backward in time. Another conflates all the action in a house, from living room to attic, into a single stage space. His ingenious, nearly unstageable Intimate Exchanges has 16 permutations, depending on the choices made by characters at key points in the action...
...gimmick of House and Garden, the two Ayckbourn plays currently being presented at London's Royal National Theatre, should come as little surprise. Set in the house and garden of an English country estate during one long afternoon, the plays are performed in two separate theaters by the same cast at the same time, the actors scurrying back and forth from one theater to the other. When a character chases offstage after his dog in House, he turns up a minute later in Garden; when a jilted woman enters with a limp and dark glasses in House, you find...
...laughs are plentiful, but the comedy, as usual in Ayckbourn, is tinged with pathos and pain. The bluff, insensitive Teddy barrels over the women in his life like a speeding London taxi. Giles (Michael Siberry), the sweetly clueless next-door neighbor, is the last to learn of his wife's affair and the first, pathetically, to forgive her. Ayckbourn has made a specialty of portraying people who are too dull-witted, or self-absorbed, or obsessed with social niceties, to comprehend the wreckage around them. The boozing French actress (Zabou Breitman), after a fling with Teddy, lets loose a torrential...
...time when playwrights like Stoppard, Hare and Michael Frayn are wrestling with weighty topical issues, Ayckbourn admits to having little interest in politics: "I've lived through enough times to know, as the French say, plus ça change - nothing changes, give or take the odd Iraqi war." One thing that musters his outrage, though, is the dwindling government funding for the arts, which has endangered local theaters like his Scarborough company - where, in all his years as artistic director, he has never taken a salary. "My salary is in the accounts," he says, "but it usually goes flying...
Indeed, it's those populist, regional roots that helped shape Ayckbourn's aesthetic: his commitment to exploring serious and subtle themes without abandoning his primary job of keeping an audience entertained. "I grew up in this little town writing for a theater that relies entirely on its audience to survive," he says. "It's not just a matter of making them laugh. It's giving them a reason to want to stay in the theater." He's been able to keep them in the theater with less apparent effort than almost anyone writing today. And even if the folks...