‘My first play was terrible!’ Alan Ayckbourn on his dazzling career – and writing his 90th play

It is a mind-blowing fact that when Show & Tell opens at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph theatre in early September, it will be Alan Ayckbourn’s 90th play. Talking to the dramatist at his home in the town, I discover something even more astonishing: that he has a reservoir of yet more plays still awaiting production.
“During Covid,” he says, “I was stockpiling plays, and each year in Scarborough we have a special weekend when I stage a reading of one. Last year, it was Truth Will Out, which was about a boy sitting in his bedroom in Barnsley who tries to hack into the computer of a girl he fancies, and inadvertently brings the country to its knees. This year’s reading will be of a play called Father of Invention and – given that I’ve already written a new piece for full-scale production next year, and sketched out another for 2026 – I guess the full total is getting near to 100.”
What’s more, if you visit the Ayckbourn website, meticulously maintained by Simon Murgatroyd, you will find classics from the past are still being revived: Bedroom Farce is at the Mill at Sonning theatre in Reading, and Relatively Speaking starts at Sheringham Little theatre in Norfolk later this month. But Ayckbourn’s focus is on Show & Tell. Without giving too much away, it is about a retired older person who engages a company to put on a play – a mini French farce – in his home for himself and his wife.
What led Ayckbourn to that unlikely subject? “At this stage,” he says, “I’m either in a reminiscent or a sci-fi mode. Last year I wrote a big AI play, Constant Companions, about androids interfering in people’s lives. So this year, I decided to write about what has been the love of my life: the theatre. I called on memories of the way my mentor, Stephen Joseph, sent companies careering around the country in lorries. But I also read about a company that did plays in people’s front rooms during lockdown, and I thought that was a nice idea. I also wanted to write a tragic love story about old age and dementia. But I hope that, without being cloying, the play is a celebration of the relation between actors and audience.”
The play emphatically isn’t cloying. It has some surprisingly sharp things to say about the idea of taking art to the people – often in their places of work. This is a worthy notion but one that, according to Ayckbourn, had its pitfalls. He says: “I remember we took three plays by David Campton to Wellingborough. There were also a group of folk singers going round the local pubs, turning down the jukebox and singing traditional ballads. This led to a mass exodus and the prospect of this folk group chasing their audience from one pub to the next.”
He goes on: “The Campton plays were sombre pieces about nuclear holocaust and the four-minute warning. I said no one is ever going to come. But, while we were totally shunned by the locals, coachloads of people came down from Hampstead: exactly the kind of audience we were trying to escape. As Robert Bolt once said, you can’t persuade people to swallow art unless you do plays they actually want to swallow.”
That sounds reactionary, but the 85-year-old’s whole career is proof that you can write plays that are simultaneously popular and challenging. As Terry Eagleton wrote, he is “our finest imaginative analyst of the hilarity of human unhappiness”. But I am fascinated by what he thinks has changed, in his own work and the theatre at large, since he had his first play put on at the old Theatre in the Round at the Library theatre, Scarborough, in 1959 when Harold Macmillan was prime minister.
“That play,” he says, “was The Square Cat, which was about a silly pop singer falling in love with an airheaded woman. Now it seems terrible, but it kept me going spiritually and made me my first real money – £30 to be precise – which, given that I was earning less than £10 a week as an actor, was a lot. At a time when Stephen Joseph put on a lot of earnest plays, it also made people laugh. But as you get older, you get more complex. I admit that in my early plays the characters were little more than ciphers: you asked the actors to add water and stir. Now I hope I have broadened my curiosity about people and the possibilities of theatre.”
As he says this, Ayckbourn gives a fine example of the way plays can change their meaning with shifts in society. He cites Things We Do for Love, which was first staged in 1997, had a successful West End run with Jane Asher, and has recently been revived by Ayckbourn himself.
“One of its issues,” he says, “is domestic abuse and now, thankfully, there is a much sharper awareness. In the play there’s a fight between the two main characters which starts with the man hurling a scrapbook at a wall and so bringing down the shelving which the woman has built. She starts pushing him, he pushes her, all hell breaks out and they punch each other to a standstill. I told our fight director to keep the conflict going for longer than we expect because I wanted to bring out the horror. But the point is that audiences who initially laughed at that scene now get a serious jolt.”
If attitudes have changed, so, too, has theatre technology. Since Ayckbourn has long been hooked on gadgetry – as shown in plays like Henceforward and Comic Potential – I wonder how he feels about the current obsession with putting cameras and mics on stage. “I’m a bit of a back-to-basics man really,” he replies. “The strongest points theatre makes are down to character and narrative. The late Mick Hughes always used to say to me, ‘Is my lighting telling the story?’ And when I was at the National doing A Chorus of Disapproval, Michael Gambon went around and kicked all the float-mics that had been placed at the front of the stage. When someone asked him why, he said, ‘If people can’t be heard, they shouldn’t be on the stage.’
“I suppose when I started out, it was actor-driven theatre, then it became writer-driven theatre and eventually director-driven theatre – although Stephen Joseph used to say directors are just there to make the tea. Now theatre is increasingly in the hands of technicians. If you walk into an auditorium during the final stages of a musical, you will find the stalls entirely occupied by people at desks who are there balancing sound, light and everything.”
Looking at theatre at large, Ayckbourn also feels the financial need for co-productions is reducing individuality. “When I ran the Stephen Joseph,” he says, “I used to think there were three theatres in the region that had strong voices. One was ours. Then there was John Godber at Hull Truck, who saw life from a working-class angle. And there was Barrie Rutter at Northern Broadsides, who was a remarkable actor-producer. Both companies used to visit us, but were totally distinctive. If I had tried to co-produce with those two, the result would have been a total mishmash.”
Even if Ayckbourn is critical of some aspects of modern theatre, he is anything but a curmudgeon. He rejoices in the wealth of good actors around and feels no nostalgia for the old days of weekly rep: he remembers the cast always used to say they had just about mastered a play by Saturday night, by which time it was off.
When I play a daft game and ask him who he would invite to an ideal dinner party, he suggests Chekhov and Ibsen, because he would like to discuss the humour in their plays, Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton to talk about their serious approach to comedy, and French actor Stéphane Audran for her wit and intellect. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Ayckbourn, as he comes close to scoring a century as a dramatist, is that he is still writing vigorously after a stroke in 2006.
“I woke up after the stroke,” he says, “and for the first time since I was 14 or 15, I had no idea for a play. I felt totally empty and desolate. But I thought, ‘You’ve got a good back catalogue and can start reviving the buggers and bore everyone to tears.’ Six or seven weeks later, a tiny germ of an idea arrived and I said to myself, ‘Thank you, God’ – because that is the one thing you can’t legislate for: that initial spark. I started laughing deliriously and, although the play I wrote started out as a comedy about gender swaps, it got darker. I slowly got back on my feet.” You could say that, creatively, he has not stopped running ever since.