Programme Note: Unknown production

In 1987, at the request of Sir Peter Hall, I took a two year leave from the tiny in-the-round theatre which I direct in Scarborough…. I was invited to form my own acting group, one amongst several, that operated at that time under the overall title of the National Theatre of Great Britain.
Peter’s brief to me had been fairly general: an acting company of around 20, three productions, one in each of the NT’s auditoria with the proviso that one of these should be a new play of my own….
A Small Family Business was the result. It has been described as my “state of the nation” play. I suppose there’s a certain truth in that, though I would hate to think that it could be interpreted as a political piece. Social yes, political no. Politics and politicians are after all, in a democracy, merely the symptoms of that society’s current disease. They neither cause it and rarely can they cure it. The sickness in this instance seems to me to be an insidious erosion of any agreed moral code of behaviour. When is it right to steal? Is it ever permissible to kill another human being? Are there special circumstances where certain criminal acts become permissible? A lot of people seem to be asking these questions with increasing frequency, coming up with dangerous answers.
No play can hope to answer such fundamental questions. What it does is point out, I hope, that the slope from permissible to the unacceptable is a slippery one. The human mind left to its own devices can usually justify any code of behaviour it chooses to suit circumstances. Beware!
(Alan Ayckbourn)

Preface: Alan Ayckbourn - Plays 1

I suppose what immediately links these plays is that they were written within a four-year period (1984-87) and could be loosely described as belonging to my 'social' period.
That is to say, they all deal with Society, capital S, in contrast to some of my earlier domestic pieces where human activity tended to revolve around the sexual tensions of the dining table or the three-piece suite. Even Henceforward... in its claustrophobic way is light years apart from the family familiarity of, say, The Norman Conquests.
A Chorus of Disapproval had a curious start. I wanted to write a play about an operatic society, heaven knows why. My first idea was to pen something for a large cast, using professional principals and a supporting cast of dozens of amateur singers. The latter would be seated in the auditorium, to all appearance like members of the audience, but they would from time to time during the action stand up and sing some linking comment or other like an operatic Greek chorus. I planned to base the play around a presumed production of The Vagabond King. I had read the libretto and I confess it amused me no end, particularly its choreographic stage directions.
Several things conspired to thwart the original idea. The Rudolph Friml Estate, fearing for their play, refused to release the rights. For which I didn't blame them one bit. Simultaneously, those members of the local Scarborough Operatic Society whom I had approached seemed reluctant to accept anything but leading roles, for which I didn't blame them either; and finally Equity, the Professional Actors' Trade Union, declared the whole idea of including amateurs in this way unacceptable. Which forced me into swift solutions, all of them, it transpired, blessings in disguise.
First I decided to work with an entirely professional company and thus with a much smaller cast; sensible and far more economic. Secondly, to avoid further copyright problems, I found an author who had been dead so long that he and his relatives no longer cared. Which led me to a musical play I greatly admired and had always wanted to produce, Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Which in turn provided the missing piece to the whole venture. Gay's play had a plot which echoed almost perfectly the one I intended to write and provided the perfect mirror image on which to build my own dramatic structure.
Moral: always work with something you admire and not with something which you only set out to make fun o That way you might even manage to raise your game rather than lower it.
A Small Family Business, written in 1986, was unusual in that it was the first play for over twenty years which I had to submit and await someone else's verdict as to whether it merited production.
Sir Peter Hall, who had introduced me to the National Theatre in 1977 with Bedroom Farce, had been an occasional producer of my plays on the South Bank ever since (including A Chorus of Disapproval). In 1985, Peter asked me if I'd like to take a break from Scarborough and come and run my own company at the National. My brief was to direct three plays over a two-year period, one in the conventional proscenium-arched Lyttelton, another in the large open-staged Olivier and a third on the smaller-scale, flexible Cottesloe stage. The only condition was that the one in the Olivier must be a new one of my own. I would have choice of the other two plays and be able to handpick my own acting company of twenty. The prospect of playing with such large toys proved irresistible.
I knew the Olivier of old. Not the friendliest of spaces for those purveyors of modern low-key naturalistic drama. 'For love scenes you stand six feet apart and shout at each other,' Michael Bryant, that most experienced of Olivier performers once advised me. 'All other scenes you stand twenty feet apart and yell.'
In the end, the solution I came up with was a variation of the one I first used with my first play in the Lyttelton, Bedroom Farce. Namely, if you can't find anything big enough to fill the space, then divide the space. With A Small Family Business I found the perfect excuse to put on stage something that had always been till then beyond my wildest budget, namely a two-storey house complete with working kitchen and bathroom. The biggest dolls' house in the world. Peter described the piece as a modern morality play. He said it reminded him of Ben Jonson. I later read some Ben Jonson but I must confess I didn't understand much of it. Still, I was very flattered.
While I was waiting a year to direct that (the National always need things so far in advance) I wrote Henceforward... This combined two or three of my interests at the time. It's a play about the creative process: always difficult to portray on stage and rarely that convincing. Actors sitting pretending to be novelists, scratching away fiercely with quill pens whilst declaiming their prose aloud at twice the speed they are supposedly writing - Wuthering Heights in five days. It never makes good theatre. Nor do classical composers humming or painters holding up one thumb and squinting, and as for poets ... But a modern composer, that was a different matter, especially one who worked entirely electronically with pre-sampled and generated sound. The result there could be, with only the smallest dramatic licence, quite immediate.
Henceforward... is on the surface a comedy but it does present a gloomy prediction of a possible future world where society, maybe as a direct result of the behaviour portrayed in A Small Family Business, has all but collapsed. And I suppose any play in which the hero allows his wife and daughter to die whilst he finishes writing his latest composition can't be considered all funny. (I wonder where I got this reputation for being a comic dramatist.)
Jerome, the composer, was based on someone whom I met briefly one Christmas: an art historian who chose to live, or rather to remain living, in one of the bleaker of our Northern inner-city no-go zones. Alone on the top floor of his vandalized and abandoned tower block he sat writing, surrounded by the sounds, the images and the beauty of Renaissance music and art. 'Why do you stay there?' I asked him. His answer was quite chilling. 'I feel', he said, 'that if I go, then the light might finally go out completely.' The idea that each of us has a duty to provide illumination, as it were, in order that others might see more clearly is an image that has remained with me.
Henceforward... also provided me with the opportunity to indulge my love of robots. In particular the British (sorry-about-that-mate-we're-still-waiting-for-the-part) sort of robot: totally eccentric, idiosyncratic, unserviceable and unreliable.
Finally, in Man of the Moment, written in 1988, I turned my attention to the nature of celebrity and fame, particularly with regard to television. Based on the unoriginal but eternally true observation that good news is no news and bad news is good news, I reflected on the question of why it is that the camera can often make the really good appear dull whilst transforming villains into instant sources of fascination and attraction. The answer is, of course, that whereas it doesn't tell flat lies, the camera often tells less than the whole truth. And to make it work for us we master techniques and tricks, all those skills which come naturally to the manipulators, the dissemblers and the con men but which are often beyond the capability of the earnest, the decent and the sincerely honest.
Driving each day to the National whilst rehearsing Man he Moment, I passed posters for the film Buster, celebrating the life and crimes of one of the Great Train Robbers. It occurred to me then that the forgotten man in that media-celebrated event was the train driver himself who subsequently died of his injuries. Who would make the film about him? It was a small journey from there to the staged reunion between Douglas Beechey, the have-a-go bank clerk and the successful media star and reformed bank robber, Vic Parks. Once again, and by no means for the last time, I brought light and darkness face to face on stage, clear cut and identifiable. Would that the choice was always that easy.

Copyright of Alan Ayckbourn