60 Years At The SJT: 1989
In 1989, Alan Ayckbourn celebrated his 50th birthday and the 30th anniversary of his professional playwriting debut at the Library Theatre in Scarborough.
He had been Artistic Director of the company for 17 years by this point and been associated with the company for 32 years.
It was a time, he felt, to celebrate by doing something audacious and new. As a result, he came up with a plan to create an epic, two-part, five-hour play called The Revengers' Comedies.
"I've made it to 50, so I thought I'd give people a present. You can't have an 'event' every year, or they become ordinary - but every two or three years, I like to do something a bit different like The Norman Conquests, or Intimate Exchanges. This one is a bit of an epic."
It had actually been 17 years since Intimate Exchanges and although there had been big plays such as Way Upstream, A Chorus Of Disapproval and Man Of The Moment - they were not at the time advertised or regarded as an 'event' play in the way The Revengers' Comedies, Intimate Exchanges or, later, House & Garden, would be.
"I wrote it for fun, really. I was suddenly aware that everyone was asking me, 'What issue are you going to address with this play?' And I don't want to address an issue. I want to tell a story; I want to write a good thriller, which is sort of unfashionable now. Nobody ever asked what issues Alfred Hitchcock addressed. He just addressed the idea of scaring you."
The play paid homage to Alan's great love as a child and young man - cinema. Alan had not been raised as a theatre-goer, but was obsessive about cinema; indeed throughout this career, many of his most significant influences are cinematic as opposed to theatrical.
Here Alan wanted to create a film on stage, cinematic in scope with more than 20 characters and sudden shifts of location from the city to the country.
It's most singular influence was the classic revenge movie Strangers On A Train and whilst the title suggest there was a particular theatrical influence, this was not the case.
The play concerns a recently made redundant city executive and a rich, upper-class country-set who has been crossed in love. She, Karen, persuades Henry Bell that revenge is the only possible solution to their problems and that by swapping their revenges, they can find the closure they need.
It obviously does not go to plan.
Henry falls in love with the woman he's meant to be taking his revenge against whilst Karen proves to be psychotic and terrifyingly efficient as she ruthlessly dispatches all in her way at Henry's former company.
"I wanted to write a play about a man who picks up a stray kitten and finds it's a boa constrictor instead.... My alter ego Karen is completely off her trolley. In theatre, there's humour between the cracks of the horror. I'm fascinated by treading that razor-blade."
Once written, it became obvious the play was to pose a huge challenge to the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round on practically every level. Helping meet this challenge was what would become for many years the quintessential Ayckbourn team. The playwright directing with Roger Glossop designing and Mick Hughes lighting. Whilst Alan had worked with both previously in London, this was the first time he had brought them to Scarborough to all work together. It would not be the last time.
With a relatively restrictive budget need to create a cinematic epic on stage, Roger and Mick ingeniously solved Alan's technical challenges with a minimum of props, using light and a versatile pulley system to allow the action to move seamlessly and quickly from one location to the next as the play with its short, fast-moving, location-hopping scenes required.
The play featured a cast of 14, the largest yet seen in an Ayckbourn play in Scarborough, and the publicity department was tasked with making this a major theatrical and celebratory event. To this end, a decision was made to run the play in its entirety every Saturday with the two parts split by a break for tea, which could be taken - picnic-style in the grounds of the former school now theatre.
An event it certainly became and proved to be a huge success for the theatre and drew attention from around the world. It is fair to say, that this was the point that the Stephen Joseph In The Round's profile was at its highest and that aside from the eponymous Fair, Alan and the theatre had become the one thing which was most related to the town around the world.
"It is hard to speak highly enough of a work whose elegant writing and staging is accompanied by an utter lack of pretension. Mr. Ayckbourn would as soon make reference to the Everly Brothers' song Cathy's Clown as to Cyril Tourneur's Jacobean Revenger's Tragedy. That's in keeping with a writer who chooses to work on a small stage in a small town but whose talent and theatrical ambitions increasingly seem without limit."
Frank Rich, The New York Times
The Revengers' Comedies succeeded in Scarborough where it did not in the West End. The need to see a play over two nights or for the better part of a day, worked in the repertory theatre of a small town, but failed to transfer to well to London. It became one of the final nails in the playwright's relationship with London and the complete realisation that his work there could rarely if ever reach the peaks of performance and staging it attained in his home theatre.
Although even Alan came away from that summer in Scarborough exhausted....
"I intend The Revengers' Comedies as a sort of fiftieth birthday present. I can’t think who on Earth the present is aimed at. Certainly not myself - the thing is a technical nightmare and puts years on me. In two halves, four parts, thirty scenes, playing time well over four hours, often on a single day with Glyndebourne style intervals. We all lose a lot of weight this summer. I eat a lot of cold salmon."
