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Heather and yon with Alan Ayckbourn's wife
Sunday, January 28, 2001 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
Meeting Alan Ayckbourn's wife on a grubby, wet Friday, I congratulate her on having brought her own weather with her.
"Yes!" she says, "Isn't it? But you need more wind," and she tilts sideways, miming the force that blows in over Scarborough off the North Sea. That's a wind with theatrical heft, since her husband describes it rattling the chimney pots as he sat down in 1975 to write a play in December for the first time -- the wind he credits for helping turn his comedy darker.
Heather Ayckbourn is small, quick and funny, with bright eyes. She looks as if the wind might think it could blow her away but had better not try.
She is, of course, a big part of Sir Alan's life, his constant assistant in just about everything in his career outside the rehearsal room or his solitary writing, and she used to be part of that, too, until he learned to use a word processor.
"I call what I do moving paper," she says -- helping to organize his career, serving on two committees at the theater and dealing with requests for information and lots and lots of correspondence, as with Nihon University in Tokyo, which is assembling a complete archive of his work. His original papers, though, will go to the British Library.
Like him, she was an actress in her teens and a founding member of Theatre in the Round at Scarborough, but she continued to act longer, into the '80s. By then she was his regular companion and all-round assistant, though they didn't marry until 1997.
Sir Alan's first wife was actress Christine Roland, whom he married at 19. They had two sons, Steven, 40, father of Ayckbourn's two grandchildren, and Philip, 39. Philip works for an educational theater company that tours a lot in the south of France. Steven has had a varied career. "He's the sort of man it'd be handy to have come the siege," says Heather.
Scarborough is as provincial as you'd expect, she says, making the survival and growth of the theater all the more remarkable in a city with a population of only 40-some thousand in the 1980s: "Our catchment area is one-third fish." Unlike other, more industrial northern cities, it's not at all multicultural. Lots of the theater's audience comes from some distance, but about half is from Scarborough itself.
As you'd expect from a vacation area, it's pretty in season, with the Yorkshire dales and moors only a short drive and with a rugged coast. Erosion made the area famous a few years ago when a hotel fell into the sea. "We'd only recently had a first night party there, but we don't think it contributed."
Heather deals a lot with Alan's agent, Tom Erhardt, successor to the famous Peggy Ramsay. Between them they've handled most of the playwrights of Ayckbourn's generation. His plays are being staged continually somewhere in England and frequently on the continent, so there are translators and directors to deal with.
"I tend to see more productions of his work than he does. Often they're not informed. They overstate the obvious comedy, or the actors will comment on their characters. If you play the situations completely realistically and forget the laughs, it's fine. But then you see directors adding funny business. Forget that and get a move on -- just be truthful."
She says the 1975 "Jeeves," meant to be frothy and fun, was cumbersome, overlong and overweight. But not now.
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