On 6 August, 1964, Alan Ayckbourn's Mr Whatnot opened at the New Arts Theatre and was subsequently mauled by the critics. It closed just two weeks later on 22 August 1964 and left Alan so depressed, he considered giving up playwriting and for the next five years he worked for the BBC as a Radio Drama Producer in Leeds.
Fortunately, Alan didn't stop writing and Mr Whatnot was followed into the West End in 1967 by Relatively Speaking, which was considerably more successful!
To mark the 50th anniversary of Mr Whatnot going into the West End, the blog is presenting an extract from the excellent Conversations With Ayckbourn, by Ian Watson (Faber, 1988) in which Alan discusses the experience in an interview from 1981.
"Almost everything went wrong with the London production. [The producer] Peter Bridge bought it. He first of all suggested we take the whole production down [from the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent where it premiered]. Peter Cheeseman [the Victoria's Artistic Director] was less than enthusiastic about taking the whole cast, but agreed. But Peter Bridge then went back on that and said, 'No, perhaps this is bit risky. Perhaps we should think about getting a slightly better-known cast.
Where it didn't work, to put it bluntly, was that he was not happy with the play and he was not happy with the company, which I think was the most extraordinary mixture of talents. There was a young Judy Cornwell, there was a youngish Ronnie Barker, as headstrong as Ronnie is now, a very talented Ronnie Stevens, who also wanted to go his own way; and Judy Campbell, who was a totally straight actress, and Diane Clare, totally straight - both in their way experienced. And then, in the middle of this, a very young actor straight from the provinces, thrown in as the lead, who was to dominate the whole thing; and a very young Christopher Godwin also, playing the vicar and the pedestrian. The other member of the cast was Marie Lohr, a wonderful old lady who was actually the right age to play it - well, strictly she was too old to play it, she was in her seventies - and she gamely battled through the script, playing vigorous games of imaginary tennis, and broke her knee. So she was labouring under the most terrible handicap by the time we opened, with her knee strapped up. Anyway, that was the chemistry. That was the first thing: that the balance of cast and the director itself was wrong. The second thing that was wrong was that it was overproduced, and that far too much money was spent on it. Peter Rice, who'd done a lot of very nice designs for operas, came in and did some very, very decorative sets, none of which added to it. He added slides to a show that supposedly had to do with imagination.
The other thing I learned was that while theatre-in-the-round can be quite small - every square inch of space is viable playing space - when you put something on to an equivalent quite small proscenium stage, there is no way you can get it all on. Warren had put in some very charming music by Vivian Ellis, which was totally wrong. I was looking for Ibert and Poulenc - those very French things. I wanted spiky little French tunes, and I was getting rather nice little English tunes. And the thing was rapidly becoming very chintzy and very charming. It was in fact, as I think one critic called it, a very gushy evening, very pretty, very winsome. I find Marcel Marceau slightly charming, but he opened the same week as us (which wasn't a very good omen), and by comparison his show was so butch it was unbelievable. We were fairy-time, you know. If ever a show deserved to close, that one did."
You can read more about Mr Whatnot and Alan Ayckbourn's first West End production at his official website by clicking here.
Extract from Conversations With Ayckbourn (second edition, Faber, 1988) by Ian Watson, pp.51-52
