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"Usually when I write a play I feel my
head is peering up from a fox-hole while the critics take pot-shots.
With the trilogy I felt I was standing up."
(Evening Standard, 6 June 1974)
"People come here [Scarborough] for a
holiday week. They're not going to go to the theatre three times in one
week, so I wanted them to enjoy the play on the one night they went."
(Evening Standard, 6 June 1974)
"It [Scarborough] is far enough away from
London. I can relax and try something like a trilogy -
which was a gamble. It is difficult to get people along to the theatre
once - never mind three times."
(Yorkshire Post, 14 June 1974)
"Sarah in the Normans tries misguidedly to get everyone together and
make them happy, but the silly cow really shouldn't try. It's not the way to
do it. But her motives are right, although she has a lot of ulterior motives
like she really wants to lord it. I think that a lot of the worst things
that happen in life are a result of very well-meaning actions."
(Vogue, April 1975)
"At the end of the [1972] Scarborough
season the local press boy came bounding up the stairs and asked what
I'd got planned for next year. I said dunno, might finish up with a
trilogy. So there was a note in the paper, "Trilogy Eagerly Expected." I
didn't put a denial in. I thought since the Gods have said that, let's
have a go. The I realised I must make each play independent, as I
couldn't guarantee that my little holiday audience could come three
times a week. The division of the house followed. It had been hovering
around in Absurd Person Singular with the idea of using the
kitchen instead of the living room as a focal room. Audiences are always
fascinated by offstage action, so I tried to pursue it to a logical
conclusion.
"Writing the Normans took something
ridiculous like 10 days (a normal length play takes me three or four
days), but it's a round-the-clock operation, like a prolonged delivery.
I start early in the evening and writer through to 6 in the morning and
then sleep. In the afternoon I dictate from scrawled notes onto a
typewriter, which gets all the dialogue spoken; and then come on again
in the evening from what we've typed up. If anything interrupts the
flow, the play's doomed. If I leave a play for two days, it's out of
the window. With the Normans came the great day when I finished
two plays on one night, the first and last time I'll do that."
(Los Angeles Times, 5 October 1975)
"I wrote all tree together and I suppose,
ideally, they should all be seen to get the maximum enjoyment and
understanding. Hopefully, a lot of the humour is extended and enhanced
with the foreknowledge of another play. Also hopefully, they can be seen
in any order and it's not essential to see them all. Audiences do like
to revisit old haunts and friends (the secret of soap operas!)."
(Personal correspondence, March 1976)
"The only reason that Table Manners
was put on first in Scarborough - which has set the pattern ever since -
is that the actor who was playing the lead part could not turn up for
the first few days' rehearsals and that was the only play of the three
that started without him."
(Western Mail, 3 March 1977)
"The Norman Conquests, although, I thought, quite well done on
television, are essentially stage pieces and always will be. I mean, the fun
is in going on three different evenings, not in switching on three different
weeks. Most of my ideas I pinch from other media. I pinched The Normans
from The Archers."
(Municipal Entertainment, May 1978)
"It happened because a young reporter from the local paper once asked at the
end of a season what I was doing next and I said I was doing a trilogy
because I couldn't think of anything else to say. Then, months later, at the
start of the new season there it was: 'Local Playwright Writes Trilogy'. The
theatre manager rang me and asked if he should issue a statement denying it.
But I thought I might as well have a go. I wrote all three plays at once:
first three scene 1s, then three scene 2s. It wasn't as difficult as I'd
imagined."
(Over 21, August 1978)
"I couldn't have written The Norman
Conquests today. Norman would end up in a terrible state. If I'd written them now, I
wouldn't be able to resist letting them become sadder."
(Yorkshire Post, 14 April 1993)
"It was extraordinary. The critics went
barmy. But you don't appreciate the good times when they happen. It's only
afterwards. I was very depressed after the first night. I thought it just
didn't work and I went for a long walk. The next day the papers all came out
with these extraordinary reviews and all I could think was that there was
nowhere to go from here except down!"
(Scarborough Evening News, 12 April 1993)
"Look at The Norman Conquests.
Grossly over-praised. By no means my best work, as was claimed."
(The Guardian, 30 June 1999)
"Eric [Thompson, the director of the
original London productions] said, 'Do you realise we could be the first
people in history with three flops in a row, because if they don't like one,
they sure as hell aren't going to like the others!'"
(What's On, 26 July 2000)
"I told them [the London producers],
"Look, you get three for one, the same costumes, same actors - it's a
real cheapo." Eventually I said a plague on all their houses and gave
the lot to [his agent] Peggy Ramsay.
"To cut a long story short, dear old Eric Thompson [the director] read
them in hospital, liked them, and we put together a cast for the
Greenwich Theatre. On the first night poor Eric was so terrified he sat
in the dressing room and asked me to join him. We listened to the tannoy,
which went dead. I was convinced that the plays hadn't worked. In fact
the laughter had blown the tannoy. Next day we had these wonderful
reviews."
(Daily Telegraph, September 2008)
"There
were various things running through my mind when I came to writing it;
I think it’s an interesting structure to start with. I also worked on
the principal that we were fighting a rear-guard action against
television, which people were getting more and more attracted to and
also getting attracted to the big soaps like Coronation Street.
I thought, ‘it’s because they want to see the same people night after
night’ and then I thought, ‘well, I’ll give them the same people” and
it sort of worked. People were saying, ‘oh, hello Tom’ as the third
play went on. They knew him. They knew he was going to be no good
because they knew the end and people love knowing what’s going to
happen."
(Interview with Alan Yentob, 2011)
"My agent Peggy Ramsay rang me, ‘Are we going to do all these scripts
[in London], darling?’ And I said, ‘can you leave them on the shelf,
Peggy? Just hang on to it.’ And then, serendipity. Eric Thompson, my
regular London director, rang me up and said, ‘If you don’t hear from
me for a couple of days, I’m going in for a minor operation for my leg.
Have you got anything for me to read?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’ve got
plenty for you to read. The Norman Conquests!’
He read them and then he rang me up and said, ‘Fan-tas-tic! I love ‘em!
We’ll find someone to do them..’ And I said, ‘let’s do them out of
London somewhere.’ He came up with Greenwich and a lovely cast. It was
a very good relationship because, in rehearsals, we were Little E and
Big Al - Little Eric and Big Alan - and he’d say, when we got to one of
the set pieces, like the seating of the dinner party in Table Manners,
‘well now we’re going to the dinner party. Before we block this, Al,
take it away.' And I’d say, ‘right, Tom sits there and then he gets up
and he moves over here, and so-and-so’ and I’d say, ‘thank you very
much” and I’d sit down again. I did the same in all three plays; all
the set pieces. I’d get up and Eric was quite happy to sit back and
take a back seat and the actors were quite happy to see the author
bound in because it was probably much quicker than working it out from
the page. How you do that dinner party scene is pretty tricky, although
here are ways of working it out - Matthew Warchus worked it out very
well in his production - but you can get in an awful tangle."
(Interview with Alan Yentob, 2011)
"Occasionally, lightning strikes like Matthew Warchus' production of the Normans,
which he did beautifully. When he sat down with the actors on the first
day, he said, 'I believe these plays to be sad and truthful and funny.
We get all that if we approach them as if we were approaching Chekhov.'
And they did that. I spoke to one of the actors, and he said, 'Oh, he's
so fierce. If you did something funny, he would say, 'Take it away.
Stop it.' And it worked because the characters were allowed to breathe
and not do funny things that sometimes short-change them to the
audience. I recently said to a director, 'Audiences are like furtive
strangers standing outside school gates with bags of sweets. You follow
them at your peril.' They lead you down the wrong path, and then they
say, 'We don't believe you' at the end of it when they've laughed and
laughed and encouraged you to be funnier and funnier. They drop you,
and you're dumped as a character and as an actor, so always stay true.
That's the point."
(Playbill, 28 December 2011)
Copyright: Alan Ayckbourn |
Alan Ayckbourn talks about Writing and Staging The Norman Conquests
(based on an interview with Roy Stacey)
Off-Stage Characters and Action
Very early on in my career as a dramatist I discovered that, given the
chance, an audience's imagination can do far better work than any number of
the playwright's words. The offstage character hinted at but never seen can
be dramatically as significant and telling as his onstage counterparts.
Offstage action is more difficult. Unless care is taken, if the dramatist
chooses to describe rather than show his action, the audience can rapidly
come to the conclusion that they're sitting in the wrong auditorium.
"Absurd Person Singular" could be described as my first offstage action
play. "The Norman Conquests" was to all intents and purposes the end of my
exploration of offstage action. Three plays, two of which were happening
offstage simultaneously with the one onstage, were quite enough. (Alan
Ayckbourn in Preface to collection of "Three Plays").
Having been an actor and having gone through all those exercises that all
actors go through at some time or other ... What happens to this guy when he
leaves the stage? . . . I had a natural curiosity about this, and I think
the audience does, too, firstly about the offstage character and then the
offstage action. Certainly I had gradually been discovering that offstage
characters have a tremendous value. It's a device by a dramatist - as a
painter might give perspective to a picture by putting something in there -
whereby an offstage character can add a depth and dimension to a play and a
sense of reality to life going on offstage, which one is always trying to
do. In the least successful plays one doesn't believe the characters have
any existence beyond the door that's painted on the set. A good test of a
play is that people actually fill in. There's a character in Absent
Friends, Gordon, a very large man, who spends all his time in bed and
never comes onstage - but a lot of people have said they know him very well,
and it's only because of the way his wife speaks about him.
So when it came to Absurd Person Singular this was carried a stage
further - although there are two offstage characters, Dick and Lottie
Potter, who are the more monstrous for not appearing. I don't know if the
audience love them because of gratitude that the author is not going to
inflict them on them! I started to write this play in the sitting room, as
one would usually write about a party, and the atmosphere was deadly dull -
as indeed all the parties were. And I thought, "It must be more interesting
in the kitchen" - and indeed it was. It is one of the things I say to
younger writers - that the first thing to do is to find where your audience
is supposed to be sitting and then relate this to your action. There are
occasions when one sees plays when you feel that as audience you're in the
wrong room... people rush on excitedly describing things which have
happened next door and you think, "I wish to hell he'd put us next door -
we'd have had a really good time."
When it came to The Norman Conquests I wrote them in time sequence.
So I started with Norman's meeting with Annie in the garden, which is the
earliest moment in any of the plays, and I finished with the latest, also in
the
garden. But I went from the garden to the dining room, then to the living
room and back to the garden, and so on. I had the unique experience of
finishing at one point two plays - Table Manners and Living
Together - on the same night ... which I shall probably never do again.
But having written them crosswise, one had no sense of judgment how they
would work downwards: would they work as individual plays? So that was a
gamble. For once one has seen any one of the plays, it's very difficult to
divorce yourself to judge any of the others. They all have different and
interesting shapes.
Staging The Norman Conquests
It's obviously not possible for many amateur societies, or for that matter
professional companies, to do all three plays in repertoire. My only strong
reason for arguing that wherever possible all three should be done is that
they do make very good box-office, because quite often there's a very nice
"knock-on" effect - where people who have had their appetite whetted will
come back and see two or all three. Certainly when we first did them we had
a wonderful audience response - we tripled our audience, in fact. I realised
that we were on a terrible gamble, because what may happen is that everybody
hates the first play, and then we should be stuck rehearsing two more we
were in honour bound to put on - and we had three failures. Fortunately the
reverse happened: the first play was very popular and people came back.
They're not actually very difficult to stage. I work in a company where
cheapness is a priority - we work on very low budgets. First you have three
plays with three sets of identical costumes - so you have six hours of drama
with very little outlay in the costume department. There are, of course,
three different sets, but in London and indeed in our own productions two of
the sets were virtually interchangeable. They're all written for two
entrances, and all we did in London was shift a window round; in one of the
sets (Table Manners) there was a sideboard in a recess, and all we
did for the Living Together set was take away the sideboard - and
there was a window. You obviously have to change the furniture around, but
that can be done terribly simply. The garden set is more difficult, but in
some ways gardens are easier than interiors, because they can be suggested.
We did have to do quite a lot of alteration from the original production at
Scarborough in the round, to the open and proscenium stages; quite a lot of
re-angling was necessary. We did in fact lose one of the entrances in
Table Manners: we made it into French windows, whereas in fact it should
have been a door to the kitchen. Staging at Scarborough was very simple. We
moved the window seat round. We needed a large dining table for Table
Manners, which is the main obstacle. A lot of the furniture even got
carried from room to room, particularly the chairs. For the gardens we got a
bird bath and a big gorse bush, and used some rostra for a veranda - it was
as simple as that, and it doesn't need all the elaborations. I had a very
small stage team, and the onus of playing in repertoire was really on them
rather than on the actors, for whom it was stimulating.
When we first started rehearsing I wondered whether we might have problems
of the actors being confused and forgetting which play they were in. We had
the longest read-through of all time - some six hours - and I said we'd have
to have some sort of a fine (a round of drinks for everyone) for the first
person who said a line from the wrong play, but it only happened once. The
fact is that, as long as you come off in the right place, you can't go
wrong; and once you're on, you're on - and you're all right.
What I found particularly nice also was getting that "club" feeling on the
part of the audience in the theatre. Even when the plays went to the Globe
Theatre, in London (which you can hardly call a "club" theatre!) there was
that same "matey" feeling as a lot of the audience had seen each other
before. They were getting out their diaries and saying, "Can we all manage
the 25th?..."
I had set myself a series of principles - to work with a Scarborough
audience. In the summer an audience is basically in the town for only one
week. During that week it would be folly to expect them to come three times.
They might - but it's unlikely. So I had first of all to cater for persons
who saw only two: if they were faced with the thought that if they'd seen
only two they wouldn't have enjoyed them, they wouldn't have to come to any.
I also had to face the fact that people would not necessarily be able to
come in the "correct" order - so they had to be capable of being seen in any
order. They had to be interchangeable, and also to stand on their own, and
any combination had to be understandable, but at the same time I had
to spice a little into each one so that people wanted to come back to see
the others ... In each play there's a little reference to something
happening offstage: "The disastrous thing in the garden" - and I hope people
will want to find out what that was. It's very annoying of course sitting
next to someone who has already seen The Garden, who goes "Ha, ha,
ha" at this point, because one thinks, "What on earth is he laughing at?"
The business with the waste-paper basket is, of course, the classic one.
The original order of playing in repertoire was: Table Manners,
Living Together, Round and Round the Garden. In my book the only
reason for Table Manners opening first is that technically it is
slightly more difficult: it has more props, there's all that food... it's
fairly simple food, but there's quite a lot of business with knives and
forks, etc., for Sarah to deal with, and it can be quite a little headache.
A lot of people claim that The Garden is the best to start with,
because it is the frame to the whole picture - it has the very beginning and
the very end. I'm very loath to label them in order 1, 2, 3, because I think
it is possible to play them in any order; in fact, it's interesting that a
lot of people claim that the order they saw them in is the best - which
rather proves my point. Naturally people do have their favourite of the
three, but fortunately these seem to be fairly evenly divided.
When I first wrote them West-End managers were very wary of them, as a trio.
What encouraged me was that I got separate offers for separate plays - which
was better than everyone wanting to do the same play but not being
interested in the other two.
The Norman Conquests & TV
As far as the TV production was concerned - I think that all my plays tend
to lose something on television, because they're written for the stage.
Talking to TV directors, they tell me that one of the problems is that if
one is writing well for the stage (which I hope I am!), then anyone who is
on the stage is important. But in TV you are always selecting: the whole art
of television drama seems to me to be able to focus on the correct face at
the correct moment. In my plays for the stage there are no correct faces:
if, for example, you take the seating scene at dinner in Table Manners,
which on the stage is a pretty high comedy spot, it goes for nothing on TV,
because the director is forced to select his or her face; the joy on the
stage is to sit back and watching the five or six stupid people wandering
round the table, arguing and getting furious with each other - it is the
whole visual impact which is wonderful. You can't shoot everything in long
shot on TV - so it loses.
Where the TV production did gain was in a kind of melancholy aspect - one
saw them as rather sadder characters. Herbie Wise, who directed, said to me:
"I'm not going to be able to make them as funny as on the stage, but I'll
try to make the characters as true as I can. Maybe there'll be elements that
will be indicated by the close-up. Annie's plight became that much more
poignant." I think anyone who hasn't seen them onstage quite enjoys them on
TV, but anyone who has is always disappointed. You just can't capture that
shared experience with the rest of the audience.
At far as affecting future box-office is concerned, the TV production of a
stage play does reach an audience that it wouldn't normally reach. When
you're talking about viewing figures, you're talking in millions. But I
don't think the TV audience and the average theatre audience necessarily
overlaps at all. As far as a playwright is concerned TV productions do help
because it means that your plays do reach a much wider audience. When one
thinks of the number of productions my plays have had, and the amount of
publicity, it's mainly been theatrical - so there are still vast numbers of
people who know me less well (even in a town like Scarborough, where I'm
always in the papers) than they would a TV playwright, because his name is
in their sitting room, whereas this is theatre and therefore something
different. Theatre is still a minority interest, though I think an
increasingly sizeable one. I hope there's a feed-back to the theatre - for I
would hate people to think that having seen The Normans on TV they had seen The Normans. So maybe it will help wider audiences to think, "Oh, I've
heard of him on TV - I'll give it a go in the theatre."
On Excerpts ...
I would not be in favour of amateur groups doing excerpts from my plays, say
at one-act festivals, because I think that I would be the loser. I don't
like the idea of having one's work chopped up. My writing is fairly elusive:
critics have often complained that they wished I would write lines in my
plays that they could actually quote in reviews. If you lift them out of
context, there's nothing there. In some sense it's the same with extracting
scenes from the plays. You might think "It would be wonderful to do the
'game' sequence from The Normans" - but this depends on the character
of Reg and it's been carefully "seeded" for about half-an-hour that he has
this game and wants to play it, and he seizes his first opportunity to do
so. If you don't have all that build-up, it's amusing to a certain extent,
but there's not that many "funny lines". I have tried once to do excerpts
from some of my plays for the purposes of a talk - but the result was fairly
disastrous!
If amateur groups want to do one of my plays in a one-act festival, I would
prefer them to do a one-act play rather than an excerpt from a full-length
one.
This piece was printed in the September
1978 edition of Amateur Stage
All quotes and articles on this page are copyright of Alan Ayckbourn and
should not be reprinted in any form without permission. |