The Big Interview: Alan Ayckbourn

This year brings a happy occasion where there will be no need to make excuses for celebrating Sir Alan and his staggering achievements.

The summer season of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, the Scarborough venue he ran as artistic director for almost four decades, will see a couple of milestones that cannot go unremarked.

There is the theatre’s 300th new play, which, for any venue, is cause for celebration. For a one at the end of the train track out on the Yorkshire coast, it is quite some achievement.

The reason it has come this far and garnered national and international attention and praise is because of the man who celebrates a significant achievement of his own this summer.

The SJT’s 300th play will be Neighbourhood Watch which happens to be Ayckbourn’s 75th.

It’s 75 more than most of us will ever dream of writing. How does it feel? Is it something you can even describe?

“Well, um, it’s, erm...” says Sir Alan.

Beautifully eloquent, perfectly poised in his scripts, Ayckbourn in person is a raconteur, but he seems always to stumble and want to deflect the question when it concerns his success.

“Yes, the 75th, it’s erm. Not really... The anniversaries are clocking up but then they always do when you get to my age. The 300th new play is an excellent milestone to reach for the theatre. It demonstrates that the theatre has had a commitment to new writing, has concentrated on it, and I think that’s a pretty good record.”

A number of years ago, someone warned me that Sir Alan is a little, perhaps, over-proud of his achievements. Whenever I speak to him, I ask a question that might give him an opportunity to show this immodest side of himself. I have yet to experience it, despite having interviewed him on several occasions over the past seven years.

Later on, I ask him if he is aware of his reputation, of just how good he is.

“Well...,” he hesitates again.

“Occasionally I’m reminded of it when I get a Tony or an Olivier or something.”

This sentence prompts laughter at the absurdity of it. Sir Alan looks confused for the briefest moment at the laughter, before realising that the sentence “when I get a Tony or an Olivier” is so far out of the experience of ordinary mortals that it seems more than faintly ridiculous to hear it out loud.

He quickly adds: “And I think “Blimey, somebody loves you”. I wish those someones would come to the theatre a little more often.”

A man with theatre in his blood, always speaking out for the medium which has brought him so much happiness and through which he has delivered so much happiness, he’s just managed to turn a question of his personal success into a chance to get on his soapbox for the stage.

Although not a local, Sir Alan has got as close as any offcumden ever has to being fully adopted by the White Rose, by virtue of the fact that he has stayed so loyal to the town he’s called home for more than half a century.

We’re in Scarborough at Sir Alan’s home the day before technical rehearsals for Dear Uncle, his adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

Ayckbourn’s wife Heather leads us through their home near the sea front through a beautiful library with a huge round table, which Sir Alan notes as we pass it on the way out was specially made for the read-throughs of his plays. “It’s round, no head seat you see, all very democratic”.

On a terrace at the back of the house, he enjoys the sun and listening to the seagulls, which provide a backing track to the interview. It’s a lovely spot, I tell him.

“Yes, yes, the garden’s looking really nice this year.”

Heather plays the host and fetches coffee and her husband seems a man entirely at peace. He never appeared particularly harassed when he was running the theatre, but now that he has given it up and is concentrating on doing what he loves – writing and directing plays – he appears to be blissfully happy. The anniversaries coincide with a sea change of opinion. Once, he was regarded as a cosy, even maybe predictable, writer of middle-class plays for middle-class people. Some on the extreme end of the performance world’s spectrum would refer to his work in a derogatory manner – not edgy, you see.

Now people realise that while his plays focus on a certain social strata, they say a great deal about all of us.

A week after we meet, Dear Uncle opens. The Yorkshire Post falls absolutely into line with all the national newspapers – who all still trot up to Scarborough to see a new Ayckbourn play – in rewarding the Chekhov translation with four stars.

Is he aware that people have been drawing comparisons between the Russian playwright, considered one of history’s most significant, and himself?

“Yes, I’ve heard comparisons and it’s very flattering. It’s very odd. I have done very little adaptation, but when you do it is not too fanciful to say that when you do work on a writer’s play you develop quite an empathy with them. You find out what they are saying and thinking it through with them. It has been quite a joyous experience and at this point I don’t really know where he ends and I start.

“My plays have been travelling in his part of the world a lot just recently and I think it’s because we deal with the same thing – we deal with people and they don’t change very much wherever you are – except my lot drink out of a teapot and his drink from a samovar.”

The BBC’s Imagine programme is filming a documentary about the playwright to be broadcast next year.

At the technical rehearsal, Sir Alan is a gentle presence but has complete command. He tweaks the music levels and a scene change is re-done and choreographed more efficiently. He sits in a theatre seat, quietly humming to himself. He may look like an avuncular old boy, but nobody’s fooled. He has an iron grasp on proceedings.

He will soon be 73. A few years ago, he suffered a stroke which has left him unsteady on his feet. Why does he not prefer to spend all day, every day, sitting on his terrace listening to the seagulls?

“The stock answer when people ask which is the favourite of my plays is the new one, because that’s the one I’m really excited about. It’s a mountain I’ve yet to climb. I gave the new play (Neighbourhood Watch) to someone close to me to read and they said ‘good gracious, this is a man who’s taken the shackles off and thrown them out of the window’.

“It is fairly wild I have to say. I feel like with this I’m walking on new flooring and when I feel that, it’s always a good feeling. Sometimes you write a play and you think ‘well this is a bit of this and a bit of that’. When you’ve got 74 you are going to touch base with some of the same characters on occasion, but this feels like I’m consolidating everything.”

He made recently headlines when he sold his archive to York University. “Well, it was all this stuff, just... stuffed in the attic. There was an American university, but I knew someone at York and they were able to find the funding for it. It sort of feels right and proper, I like the idea of York being home for the archive.

“The great thing of course is that it will be available to the public. My website gets lots of hits from people writing to say ‘I’ve just discovered your work, have you written anything else?’.

“This will give them an opportunity to find out!”.

I think we’re going to be celebrating – and new people are going to be discovering Ayckbourn – for some time yet.

Dear Uncle is at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until September 30. Alan Ayckbourn’s 75th play, Neighbourhood Watch, opens at the theatre on September 8. Box office: 01723 370541.