A Small Family Business: Interview With Alan Ayckbourn pt.1

Alan Ayckbourn's acclaimed '80s play A Small Family Business is about to be revived by the National Theatre. In an exclusive two-part interview with his archivist Simon Murgatroyd for www.alanayckbourn.net and this blog, the playwright discusses the play, its revival and its legacy.

Simon Murgatroyd: A Small Family Business originally premiered at the National Theatre in 1987, what are your thoughts on the play now?
Alan Ayckbourn: A Small Family Business tends to be seen as quite a big play - and in terms of cast and staging for me, it is - but the actual play is not that big actually. It’s a little morality tale, which is how the National Theatre’s then Artistic Director Peter Hall originally described it when I first sent it to him.
I remember, I was in a dressing room at the National Theatre talking to an actor before the show during its original run and there was a platform talk taking place on the set of A Small Family Business. A very learned academic was addressing the play and its themes; his thesis was the play covered every single one of the seven deadly sins - lust, avarice, anger, greed etc. I thought, ‘Well, I didn’t set out to do that, but it’s an interesting - and valid - idea.’

What inspired you to write the play?

People have subsequently said I was attacking Thatcher’s state, but I was attacking society really. A Small Family Business was inspired by a feeling that I had - and I think many others at the time too - that with the slow erosion of organised religion or any agreed moral codes, many of us were tending to make up our own moral code and that was quite dangerous. Without anything to guide you, you start putting sub-clauses in: thou shalt not steal (except…); thou shalt not kill (except…). I just thought we were all putting caveats into our lives, the way we lived, and one man’s caveat is another man’s complete shock and horror!

Was this your personal experience at the time?
I remember I was sitting in the theatre’s green room once and in the space of ten minutes, an actor declared it was perfectly in order to steal food if you were hungry. Someone else replied, ‘what does that do to the price of beans, because if you steal a lot them, the prices shoot up.'
From there, somebody else said - and it really did create controversy - that it was alright to steal books from bookshops because books contain knowledge and there was an obligation for everyone to have knowledge - also a good collection of illicitly gained novels presumably!
Throughout this conversation, I was thinking, this is extraordinary. But then I remembered my own mother, who used to happily steal when she worked in offices. She used to steal all sorts of stuff. She was quite happy to pack all the hotel towels when we were on holiday as well as soap and ash trays and anything she could put her hands on. I was just a small boy and I would say, ‘Mum, you can’t do that, it doesn’t belong to us’ and she was, ‘no, no, they’ll never notice.’ The suitcases were groaning with contraband when we left the hotel! She would also come home from the office with reams of paper, paperclips and stationary - pencils, pens, anything she could lay her hands on! Of course, I thought, if you continue that to its logical conclusion, you then begin dismantling the desks and taking them out with you as you leave and eventually you close the company.

It’s also quite a subversive play, isn't it? Ideally, as an audience we remain sympathetic to the plight of the protagonist - Jack - despite where his actions lead.
It’s a play which almost follows the rules of farce as, like a farce, it leaves the audience - hopefully - saying at the end, ‘how the hell did we get here?’ As a playwright, my intention was to encourage the audience to agree with every step of Jack’s moral decline until they've got so much blood on their hands too, they’ve been led into almost becoming co-conspirators in the crimes.

The second part of this interview will be published on the blog next week. Watch this space.

A Small Family Business can be seen at the National Theatre from 1 April. Click here for further information and booking details.

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