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Stage Preview: Our most prolific playwright stages 'By Jeeves' at the Public with an eye to taking it to Broadway
Sunday, January 28, 2001 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
To explain who he is, you're driven to make comparisons with Shakespeare, Moliere and Chekhov -- and he can actually measure up. He's a uniquely inventive, productive theatrical force. And he's been busy in Pittsburgh for a month, staging the musical comedy "By Jeeves" at Pittsburgh Public Theater.
This theatrical megaweight isn't the musical's composer, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, though he's a pretty titanic force, too. But the other "By Jeeves" all-star, the one you may not have heard of, is librettist-lyricist-director Sir Alan Ayckbourn, the first playwright to be knighted since 1971. He is the most prolific major playwright in the English-speaking world, author of 59 full-length plays and several dozen other entertainments, his work translated into 30 languages and produced worldwide. And all this has been a sideline to his full-time job as artistic leader of the theater in his adopted home of Scarborough, Yorkshire.
In Shakespeare's history plays, the north is where rebellion begins. So in an earlier age, you might imagine Sir Alan as a warrior, swooping down on London to plunder the West End, successfully scaling the heights of the Royal National Theatre itself -- as he has done. But his assault on the fortress of English theater has been a more gradual affair, not so much rebellion as colonization. Ayckbourn is no flamboyant aristocrat, as Lloyd Webber has become, but a consummate man of the workaday theater, a shirt-sleeves professional just as much at home in the bustle of the prop shop or rehearsal hall as in solitary negotiation with his producers or his muse.
You'd have to call him a throwback to Shakespeare and Moliere, who also were actors who wrote plays so their companies could work. For years Ayckbourn, 61, has considered himself a director who writes, not the reverse.
"He's kind, funny and organized," testifies Public head, Ted Pappas, working with him for the first time. "He loves actors, loves the theater and knows exactly what he wants. He's pristine about language and wildly imaginative about staging."
Pappas finds him rather shy, "surprisingly, considering how long he's been in the spotlight. He seems very private, but he's fun to be around because he's so funny."
Heather Ayckbourn, his longtime assistant and companion and his wife of three years, who's in Pittsburgh with him, agrees that he's a bit of a loner: "He likes to shut himself in to write or he goes off to direct."
Well, how do you write 59 full-length plays? One at a time -- briskly. Ayckbourn takes only a few weeks to write a play once or twice a year to fill production slots committed long in advance. For "Bedroom Farce," one of his biggest hits, he started writing on a Wednesday, wrote around the clock for three days, typed it on Saturday and gave it to the actors Monday, before sleeping for two days solid.
But 59 isn't all. Often he writes not single plays but clusters. An ingenious craftsman who rearranges space and time, confounding genres and audience expectation, he creates plays that are really two, overlapping, or with built-in alternatives that flower into four or eight. His inventiveness works against translation to TV or film, since his plays rejoice in achieving the believable while flaunting their make-believe.
So where does he stand in the all-time rankings? Frequent critical comparisons to Chekhov are an indication of how history may judge. As to quantity, in 1989 Ayckbourn passed Shakespeare's 37 and more recently, Shaw's 50-odd. The all-time champions remain pretty far ahead: Goldoni, who produced 16 comedies in one season alone, or Lope de Vega, currently credited with at least 314 of the 1,500 he claimed. But just as shooting your age is a dream of older golfers, who but Ayckbourn has the chance to write his age? -- to write as many plays as he is old, which, at his current speed, he should soon achieve.
And yet something has kept him from the American success you'd expect. Only four of his plays have made it to Broadway. Pittsburgh has had only a half-dozen professional stagings in two decades. So you are forgiven if Ayckbourn's significance has escaped you.
His current endeavor won't completely redress the balance, because "By Jeeves," based on the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves novels of ineffable humorist P.G. Wodehouse, is designedly very light compared to his probing of middle-class reticence and despair that fuels those comparisons to Chekhov.
But there's historical significance here. Neither Ayckbourn nor Lloyd Webber has ever had such a resounding dud as the original 1975 musical, then called "Jeeves." Neither was yet theatrical royalty, but it still rankled. So 20 years later they rewrote it from the ground up and presented it to varying degrees of acclaim in England and America. But it didn't go to New York, so they are still trying.
In person, Ayckbourn matches expectation. A man used to the communal give-and-take of the theater doesn't stand on ceremony. One who more often has to take laughs out of his work rather than force them in, he is smart and witty. As we settle down in his office at the Public for a lengthy interview, he arranges for an assistant to check back halfway through.
"So if things aren't going well, he can get rid of me," I suggest. "OK, we'll use this banana as a signal," jokes the master of stage technique: "If you come back and it's pointing at him, get him out of here early." That reminds him of a story about English actor Tom Courtenay, who always fell in love with someone in the cast. So they invited Courtenay to auditions and developed a system of signals to ensure that any actress he fancied would not be hired, but it all came to naught, resulting in the expected melodrama, with an older actor complaining, "They're all crying backstage all the time."
It's an anecdote that could come right from his own plays -- possibly one of the "Norman Conquests" trilogy (in which Courtenay starred in London as the libidinous Norman).
For all his fluent talk and easy laughter, Ayckbourn lives up to his reputation for being shy. He looks off into the middle distance as he reminisces, checking back occasionally with a shrewd glance from beneath eyebrows which seem the bushier because of his sparse hair. But if he does not easily make eye contact with strangers, you hardly notice it amid his matter-of-fact garrulity, void of self-importance.
Ayckbourn has done theater in Pittsburgh before. In 1956, then 17 and in his final year of a private boarding school, he came here with a school tour of "Macbeth," playing that good man, Macduff. "We played in some sort of Gothic church," he recalls.
This time, he's in a more modern palace, the year-old O'Reilly Theater. He has his own office for the duration -- the office reserved for the Cultural Trust, whose building it is. Does this mean special privileges are afforded to playwrights? Or just to theatrical knights?
He has even reoriented the O'Reilly stage. Though his plays begin in-the-round at Scarborough, they're transposed to proscenium (picture-frame) stages elsewhere. In 1996, "By Jeeves" played on such stages at Connecticut's Goodspeed, Los Angeles' Geffen and Kennedy Center's small Terrace Theater. Pittsburgh is using those same costumes and the Kennedy Center set -- but it could do that only by converting the O'Reilly's thrust stage into proscenium. Of the three main stage configurations, Ayckbourn likes thrust the least.
When Ayckbourn finished school at 17, he had no thought of university. "I wanted to go right into theater. My housemaster was almost hysterical." The teacher who'd gotten him hooked on theater gave him two professional contacts. The first was the grand old actor-manager, Donald Wolfit, who wrote back (Ayckbourn has the letter): "I will take the boy for 3 a week" for three weeks as assistant stage manager and bit actor at the Edinburgh Festival. The second got him a six-month, unpaid student gig with a provincial repertory company. He was on his way.
Fate brought him to Stephen Joseph, charismatic son of Hermione Gingold, who had discovered theater-in-the-round on a trip to America and became its most avid British proselytizer. Joseph led a company that toured until it found a permanent home in Scarborough, 200 miles north of London on the North Sea coast. When Ayckbourn joined, they were doing an eight- to 10-week summer season in a meeting room in the town library.
"It was an extraordinary training ground," he says. The theater was his university. He did plays by the dozens of all kinds, he acted, he did lights, sets, props, sound (still a favorite) and directed. And from the first, Joseph encouraged company members to write plays that would make vacationers laugh: "This seemed to me as worthwhile a reason for writing a play as any," Ayckbourn says. He had had four plays staged by the time he was 22.
At Scarborough he met his first wife, Christine Roland, with whom he had two sons, Steven, 40, and Philip, 39. Steven has made him twice a grandfather.
At first, employment at Scarborough was just seasonal and there was lots of touring, but they gradually added a Christmas season, then spring, then fall. From 1965 to '70, Ayckbourn took a job as drama producer for BBC Radio in Leeds, racing back and forth to Scarborough whenever possible. Then in 1970, his mentor Joseph having died, he became head of production in Scarborough, and except for a two-year stint as a director at the National Theatre from 1986 to 88, he's been there ever since.
In that time, he's seen the company through two moves. The performing space has remained in-the-round. To open the new theater in 1996, he and Lloyd Webber rewrote "By Jeeves," and to use the company's second (proscenium) theater in 1999, he wrote the intricately dovetailed "House" and "Garden" -- two plays in separate theaters at the same time using the same cast, each actor exiting from one stage just in time to enter the other.
It's key to Ayckbourn's career that he's not been based in London with its attendant spotlights and pressure. In Scarborough, he had permission to fail, if not too often. "Yorkshire people are very laid-back about me and my success." And in the Scarborough theater, "everyone's within feet of each other. Nearly every day I walk through every part of the theater -- workshop, wardrobe. I love being part of the fabric of the building. Last summer, doing 'House' and 'Garden' at the National Theatre, I stepped into the prop shop and heard, 'Omigod, a director!'" He was about to retreat when he was welcomed: "No, come on, we never see anybody."
"I have no formal training," he says, "but I know a little about everything."
The new theatrical age began in 1956, when John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" blew the dust off a theater of complacent nostalgia, historians say. Osborne led the way for a group of irreverent, innovative, often working-class (in sympathy, at least) new playwrights like Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, John Arden and Shelagh Delaney. English playwriting was revived, to be strengthened later by David Hare, Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer and Peter Nichols.
Although younger than Osborne, Ayckbourn's precocious start puts him in the same generation. But he didn't share that group's themes or politics, and it was a long time before he got serious critical recognition, mostly because he wrote comedies -- farces, even -- and so was condescended to as a commercial craftsman, not an artist.
It was many years before he would be recognized as "a dazzling comic writer who uses language with the precision, freshness and economy of Wodehouse or Pinter" -- a link, really, between what the angry young men disowned and what they pioneered, with his own adventuresome theatrical invention stirred in.
Given his full-time career running a theater (though he gave up acting in the 1960s), it's essential to his astonishing output that he writes fast. Initially it was at night, after performances. With a rehearsal every day at 10 a.m., he had to write quickly, because "if I did it for more than a week, I'd die."
Eventually he learned to set aside a few weeks to write. "I tend to carry a show in my head about nine months, getting ideas during boring technical rehearsals. Then I set aside three to four weeks, go incommunicado. ... Sometimes the idea isn't as good as I think. But occasionally there's another idea sitting behind it: This is the one! Once I get there, it's fast, and I'll write it in less than a week."
"Heather [then Stoney, now Ayckbourn], my long-suffering partner, used to type the script. ... I'd read it to her from my notes, some of it illegible even to me, improvising as we went. I did the whole 'Norman Conquests' trilogy that way. But one day I saw an early word processor." Suddenly he was using it himself, and Heather never did the typing again.
"I'll bang through a scene, full of mistakes. When I've shot my creative bit, I go back -- I love it to be tidy. I have backup disks which I hide and find years later in a book, labeled 'Henceforward' Backup 1."
The script written, he hands it to Alan Ayckbourn, director -- because he always directs his premieres, as well as transfers to London.
"As a director, I find it hard to sit through my work when directed by others. I have a much firmer sense of how my plays should be done." Mostly, he knows that "the comedy springs from the people, not from the lines." He has to remind actors, "Play it as if it were Arthur Miller. Trust the engine." He says good comic actors can always play tragedy but not always the other way around.
Over the years, Ayckbourn also has shown a sustained interest in children's theater. In the preface to a collection of five children's plays (Faber, 1998), he traces their gradual deepening: "I believe that now only a hairsbreadth separates my adult from my children's work."
Right into the '90s, when he wasn't staging one of his plays in London, Ayckbourn was directing a half-dozen or more plays a year at Scarborough. But in 1999, as he turned 60, "I said I wouldn't slow down, but I'd concentrate on what's exclusive to me, writing and directing my own stuff," leaving other plays to other directors. He's formed a tiny company within the main Scarborough company to do his plays, and to launch that this July, "I've written them two full-length plays that use the same size cast and same set."
That ingenious frugality is a symptom of economic hard times in British regional theater, but it's also a prime example of Ayckbourn's using external constraints to spur his creativity. He manages to set himself (and solve) problems that would baffle anyone else. In the "Norman Conquests" trilogy, he limited himself to the same six characters and two entrances, since that's what he had to work with, even accommodating one actor's late arrival for rehearsals by keeping him out of the first few scenes.
One constraint is theater-in-the-round, unparalleled for immediacy but limited as to sets. So in "Taking Steps," he wrote a farce without doors, coming up with the simple invention of setting all three floors of a house in the same space, on one level. As soon as the early scenes demonstrate the convention, the audience is happy to join his comic three-dimensional game, understanding easily that three people within inches of each other are "really" on three different floors.
A more famous Ayckbourn invention is in "How the Other Half Loves," in which one room serves simultaneously for two houses of different social status. At the climax, one couple is shown dining simultaneously in both houses on different days. Or "Communicating Doors," in which a hotel room stays constant through three different decades.
His structural interventions are legendary, but so are his plays in which variant scripts branch out from moments of indecision, turning one play into many. As Ayckbourn sums up, "The device has the effect of stimulating actors, irritating stage managers, and infuriating box-office staff," who have to explain it to ticket buyers and try to accommodate those who want to see the other variants.
He's had a recurring fascination with science fiction and musicals, but primarily Ayckbourn is master of the domestic sphere, the indoors landscape -- a comic pessimist of modern marriage. He seems to have set a play in every possible room in the house, including the garage. On stage, he can make time stand still and double back on itself, make space overlap and intertwine. Can such a man not remake history and turn his and Lloyd Webber's notorious flop into a success?
The next month is an important time in Ayckbourn's less than boffo relationship with America. "By Jeeves" here will draw a lot of theatrical interest, as much for him as for Lloyd Webber. And at the same time (Jan. 26-March 4), "House" and "Garden" have their American premiere at the dual auditoriums of Chicago's Goodman Theater.
The two plays were one of Ayckbourn's biggest London hits, playing eight sold-out weeks in the two big theaters at the National last summer. That meant 2,000 playgoers at a time, and Ayckbourn admits to "a real vanity moment, looking back up from the Thames, the terraces filled with happy audiences, thinking, 'They're all mine!' " Probably only Shakespeare could make the same claim, and he isn't here to enjoy it.
Among Ayckbourn's spatial innovations, the interlocking pair is a new high. "Usually someone says, 'Oh, that was done in 1926,' but not this time. It's a very stupid thing to do, really, but I did it specifically for Scarborough, to let people know there is a second theater."
If you want to see both, you have to come twice, but the actors do both every night. "Timing becomes terribly important -- the stage managers have to be in constant contact," to keep the two plays in sync. Even better, one cast produces two sets of box-office receipts! Given enough time, Ayckbourn may solve the theater's financial problems through ingenious playcrafting alone.
"By Jeeves" is practically earth-bound by Ayckbourn's standards, although he promises to use the O'Reilly creatively. "It's a 'Let's do the show right here' show. It should spring spontaneously out of the space."
His being here is a boon, because he's never directed a show so often. Not counting the first "Jeeves" or the initial workshop of this one, this is his sixth go. The attraction is doing it in a different space, with a cast half new since the three 1996 American productions. The leads are Martin Jarvis (Jeeves), a distinguished English actor who has worked with Ayckbourn before ("I thought it wise the most English character should be English"), and John Scherer (Bertie), a CMU grad who did the same role in 1996.
This version is "about 90 percent different" from the 1975 fiasco. Ayckbourn wrote his own story in a Wodehousean style. But "I had to remind Andrew that a lot of the original songs had already been reused. I couldn't see moving 'Another Suitcase, Another Hall' from 'Evita' back to 'Jeeves.' "
Their impromptu workshop was rapturously received, as workshops can be, but it was also a hit in Scarborough and then a popular success in London, although critics couldn't get over the earlier fiasco and kept measuring it against Lloyd Webber's epics.
In the United States, it did well at Goodspeed's small theater, and Ayckbourn had fun restaging it in Los Angeles and Washington, where it was "a big summer success. So Andrew rang up and said, 'It's really wonderful. Let's take it to New York.' " But Ayckbourn noted that the actors had other jobs scheduled and he wasn't free to direct for a year.
Three years later, Ted Pappas had lunch with Scherer and Goodspeed head Michael Price, and this revival was born. Price hopes that New York lies ahead, but Ayckbourn says, "Really Useful and Goodspeed have their interests, but I just direct it and then I go back [to England]. I have no idea." Pappas says, "If we find a suitable theater, there's more than enough interest to bring it to Broadway -- but it's very tight right now in New York."
If it does get to Broadway, it will be Ayckbourn's first there since 1979. A half-dozen have played off-Broadway with success, but even the brilliant 1988 "Woman in Mind" starring Stockard Channing couldn't make the move.
Why? There have been production blunders, such as what sank the original "Jeeves." And as Heather says, "Alan has no sentimentality in his plays, and Broadway doesn't half like a bit of that." But primarily it's because comedy depends so much on precise cultural nuance.
There's hope, though, in the comparisons of Ayckbourn to Chekhov, that since the great Russian's tragicomedies transcend cultural specifics. Ayckbourn's mature work -- light entertainments like "By Jeeves" notwithstanding -- shades comedy with tragic shadow. "Comedy and tragedy -- there's an infinitesimal difference," says his wife. "The deeper you go into a character, the sadder the play must inevitably become," says the playwright.
Thankfully, he never did use the banana.
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