Sir Alan Ayckbourn,Two Interviews by Stacey Morley..page10

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Two Interviews:Sir Alan Ayckbourn...page10

^{written by:} Stacey Morley

Interview of April 2, 1998:

S.M.- Through research I've linked a triangle between Peter Cheeseman, Stephen Joseph and yourself. An argument came up last year about some regional theatres around Britain which had come together to produce work for touring. Peter Cheeseman attacked this and stated that theatre should be there for its own particular region and if this goes ahead it will eventually kill off all regional theatre. Do you agree with that?

A.A.- Absolutely! It's interesting. Peter and I started, well not together as I was already working for Stephen before Peter came, but in the early 1960's when we went to Stoke although he was general manager of the theatre, we were virtually joint co-directors. I was in most of the shows and I directed every other one. We did that for over a year 'til eventually I left. My career changed. It changed to a certain extent from my Stoke career because I came back to Scarborough where the community itself was very different. There's no industry here unless I wanted to do documentaries on Plaxtons or Hardings, the printers, you begin to run out of things to document. He was in the middle of an industrial area which was going through the most traumatic closures to do with steelworks, there was mining, there was the potteries, all sorts of things but even he ran out of them eventually. By the end of the 1970's there was very little left to document. But he inevitably was drawn into the community and he responded to that community and the community's needs and indeed marvellous things happened - workers coming in when they were all on strike reporting at the end of the show where they stood, what was happening, so it turned into documentary drama which of course he developed very strongly. But then again I have to say, it came from, to a certain extent from that other source Joan Littlewood, he would be the first to admit it. But here there's no real possibility of documenting drama, and more importantly, there's not really a community, there is, but its a community that relies on another community or it did certainly when I was starting, which is the tourist community so it was a shifting community. A lot of Scarborough is retired people. There are many Scarborians but most people are coming from all over the country and like it here or come to work here, quite a rare bird the original Scarborian, we've got a few working here; but that was not what we were reflecting, we were reflecting something other.

S.M.- Do you think Peter Cheeseman has taken on Stephen Joseph's ideals or has he gone his own way?

A.A.- He's gone his own way. I don't think you can say that that's how Stephen would have worked. The plays he chose to do were so varied, that in the end, the plays I did with him were not now, 'the Glass Menagerie', 'An Inspector Calls' in its original version, 'Victoria Regina' the story of Queen Victoria's reign - those sort of plays. On the other hand he'd do extraordinary things like, 'Dead Life of a Mad Boy' - a weird, surreal play which would fair fairly well at the Student Drama Festival this year, sort of a mad anarchic thing.I know I raped a nun and then got cut up the middle with a knife so nothing much is new really. I was being sliced up in Scarborough in 1958 so its like saying, "Hi Quentin Tarrantino welcome back" really. But that's always the way the young write.

S.M.-. From reading your plays it seems to me that you write what you see, which is interesting because when the plays are translated into different languages, they work, which proves how all different cultures can fit into the same ideals you write about.

A.A.- Yes, I think what probably is a legacy of Stephen's and that he emphasised so much, is that people (I don't think he ever said it like this) but he would say that theatre does people best, it does feelings, it does ideas, it does big issues worst. There are some great issue based plays but they are very rare, they are mostly plays about the individual. Those plays I think where you have woman A and man B you're not suppose to know anything about them. They are not plays and appeal to a strange gathering; to the general public to get in there with Bob and Fiona then you are beginning to relate, beginning to find parallels with your own life, your partner's life or whatever.

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