Word: ayckbourn
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...fifth decade as a playwright, Alan Ayckbourn is one of British theater's senior knights. But the 63-year-old author of such bittersweet comic masterpieces as House/Garden and The Norman Conquests remains as productive as ever. His latest, Damsels In Distress, is a trilogy of self-contained plays that share the same cast but are unrelated save for the Thames-side apartment in which they...
...trilogy might seem a daunting task to most authors, but by now Ayckbourn knows his craft inside out. So much so that he has just published a how-to book, The Crafty Art of Playmaking (Faber & Faber). "I don't exclude the muse," he says. "But just letting the inspiration take you is a very risky way to write. You need rules to motor that inspiration." Scholarly in tone, the book provides what he calls 101 "Obvious Rules" for successful writing and directing. Having laid down the law, how well do his own plays follow them? Pretty closely...
Many of the precepts in the book have to do with planning a show's structure - the time frame, for instance, and the number of characters. "This phase can take at least a year," according to Rule No. 23. Ayckbourn is adamant that playwrights must take this long to consider what will work on stage. "You've got to plan the practicalities," he says, "such as how dialogue will work within a set, where an audience will be looking." In Damsels in Distress, the choice of actors' triple roles is a great example of such structural ingenuity. Saskia Butler plays...
...Ayckbourn's focus on narrative structure will come as no surprise to his fans. This most ingenious of plotters loves playing with ideas of how a story should go - 1982's Intimate Exchanges famously explored a multitude of different endings. And some trickery is afoot in Damsels (directed by the author). In play No. 1, GamePlan, a disturbing drama of teenage prostitution turns into a hide-the-corpse farce; in play No. 2, FlatSpin, a lonely-gal romance becomes a spy thriller; and in RolePlay a meet-the-parents dinner comedy morphs into a piercing study of social class...
...Obvious Rule No. 1" Ayckbourn admonishes: "Never look down on comedy or regard it as the poor cousin of drama." Both GamePlan and RolePlay make this case to devastating effect. In the first, a 16-year-old's determination to raise funds through prostitution is made more harrowing by the sight of her tearfully shy friend dressed as a brothel maid. Her exaggerated make-up and outfit provoke laughter - and unease...