A Small Family Business: Interview With Alan Ayckbourn pt.2

In the second part of an exclusive interview with Alan Ayckbourn by his archivist Simon Murgatroyd, the playwright discusses the forthcoming revival of A Small Family Business at the National Theatre and the play's relevance today. Part 1 of the interview can be found here.

A Small Family Business has been described by writers such as Mark Ravenhill and Michael Billington as one of the most significant plays of the 1980s, do you think it’s still relevant?
Definitely. How many of us today steal films and music without a second thought? All those movies people put so much effort - and money - into creating and it now seems to be perfectly acceptable to just download them. All we seemingly need to do is to create a mythical ‘them’ to justify it - ‘they’ won’t notice and ‘they’ won’t ever know.
With A Small Family Business, I started with a bottle of stolen cheap shampoo and extrapolated from there. I took the play to the worst crimes I could think of - one of them was peddling drugs to underage children and the other was murder - both of which I included. The protagonist, Jack, justifies his behaviour as being the next logical step, but remains intensely moral throughout.

Do you think this the right time for the National Theatre’s revival?

I think it all just keeps unravelling, doesn’t it? When you of think everything that has happened since 1987 - the MPs with their expenses, the collapse of the banking system, all of it - all this happened after A Small Family Business. I don’t blame people who say, ‘you can’t trust anyone these days.’ You sit there staring at people thinking, ‘what’s your angle, what are you out for?’ It’s fairly awful, the degree of mistrust we have today and it all stems from this disregard of the society we live in.

What was your experience like with the original production?
A Small Family Business was the third play during my season at the National Theatre between 1986 and 1988. All the actors had, at some stage in the season, been working together. So we hit the play running with a company that was up for it and very comfortable with each other.
It was very strange as it was the first time I’d ever written a play quite so far ahead. I gave it to the National's Artistic Director, Peter Hall, long before I even started working on my first play of the season, Tons of Money. By the time we’d finished Tons Of Money, had a small break and then did Miller's A View From The Bridge, it was almost a year since I’d written A Small Family Business.
I remember picking up the script for rehearsals - with these 6 different rooms on two floors, which fortunately the National had the facilities to give us a plywood mock up of -  and going through it and blocking it in just two days and saying “Oh, the playwright knew what he was doing!”

Are there any particular challenges in staging A Small Family Business?
You are watching action in two or three different houses at once on a single set, so it is quite complicated. It remains a huge object lesson in getting a play on its feet as soon as you start because the physicality of the play is everything; I think A Small Family Business has had - since its original production - some less satisfactory productions, to put it politely.
When directing it, you have to remember it's a narrative driven play; it’s really important you keep the audience with you at all times and don’t get sucked into big moral issues. Essentially, this remains a play about an honourable man slowly going to the bad; but - at least in his mind - he remains honourable despite all he does.

You've previously spoken about your unfulfilled plan to direct A Small Family Business at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 2012, would you still consider reviving it?
Maybe I’d revive it at Scarborough - I certainly don’t rule it out. Let's see how the National does! This production has got a good cast and the director, Adam Penford, has formed a company of good actors to tackle it. I suspect it’s a company that you'll want to accept as a family and, that's important, because it is all about the family.

A Small Family Business can be seen at the National Theatre from 1 April. Click here for further information and booking details.
You can hear more of Alan Ayckbourn's thoughts on the play A Small Family Business at his platform talk at the National Theatre at 6pm on Thursday 10 April. Click here for details.

This article is copyright of Simon Murgatroyd and should not be reproduced in any format without the permission of the copyright holder.

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.

This article is copyright of Simon Murgatroyd and should not be reproduced in any format without the permission of the copyright holder.

Replaying Ayckbourn: The Square Cat Interview

Following on from the launch of Replaying Ayckbourn last week, today takes a final look at Alan Ayckbourn's first play The Square Cat.
Here the playwright talks about The Square Cat to his archivist Simon Murgatroyd, looking at how and why he came to write it and the impact of the play.

The Square Cat: Alan Ayckbourn Interview

Simon Murgatroyd: The Square Cat was your first professional commission, why do you think Stephen Joseph took that risk on you?
Alan Ayckbourn: I think one of the reasons Stephen Joseph first asked me to write was I let slip early on that I’d written at school. In fact, I’d written my first play before the age of 12 and it was an adaptation of an Anthony Buckeridge book Jennings At School; which I wrote and never got to see because I was ill. I wrote sketches and little bits and pieces once I was at Haileybury, my public school, where the arts scene was covert and undercover and which was all very exciting; like being in the French resistance!

The story famously goes that the commission came as a direct result of you complaining about the quality of your acting roles in 1958, is this true?
Yes, I was overheard to complain about the play I was in one night [David Campton's Ring Of Roses], the way actors do. I didn’t have a very good part in it and Stephen Joseph threw down the gauntlet: “If you think you can write a better play, do so.” I said, “I can write better than this - I can write a play tomorrow that’s better than this.” And he said, “OK, do so smarty. There’s just one thing, if you write it, be prepared to play the lead in it.” Which he actually thought would queer my pitch as obviously I’m not going to be lunatic enough or suicidal enough to write myself an unplayable role in a play I didn’t have any confidence in!
But I was so swollen with confidence and possibly a slight stupidity of youth, that I wrote a play in which I gave myself this starring role.

Not just a starring role though. An all-singing and all-dancing role. Which seems slightly strange - possibly suicidal - given you were neither singer nor dancer!
The freedom to write my own play was amazing and the actor in me was urging the author in me onward and onward! So the role was a rock ‘n’ roll singer playing a guitar, singing and dancing; it was an amazing role - Michael Crawford would have died for it! But I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t dance and I certainly couldn’t play the guitar!
So it occurred to me in the first two or three weeks of rehearsals that I ought to remedy this quite quickly and I went for some guitar lessons. I didn’t even have a guitar and this boy looked at me in amazement and said, “how long have you got?” I said: “Well, about two weeks.” He said, “You can’t play the guitar in two weeks! I can teach you a couple of chords.” I said, “Yeah, OK, that’ll do. So can we find a song to go with a couple of chords?” and he said: “Well, there’s a very boring song with two chords in it!” which I finished up playing in this play of mine.

The Square Cat is a rarity for you because it is a pure farce. Why did you decide to write a farce for your first play?
The Square Cat was a farce because that was how it turned out. Everyone tells you; don’t write farces, they’re for old men. Farces are technically very, very difficult to write unless you’re a natural farceur - you have to know exactly all the wheels and nuts of play-building. Long before that, you’re supposed to write a very serious play about how your mother didn’t understand you and how your father was unkind to you; write something rather introverted and gloomy and all about you - which is what 80% of all first plays written are. First plays tend to come soaring out of a person’s unhappy childhood - if they had a happy childhood, they invent an unhappy one.
But I started with a silly play about a woman who fell in love with a pop singer and he arranges to go on holiday with her, to her family’s horror, who then turn up and try to stop her. The rest of the play is about pop singers running in and out of doors.

How was the play received by audiences at the Library Theatre?
Because The Square Cat was light and had a few laughs in it, it made money because we were still doing - in those days - plays largely written by young people who were writing about their “unhappy childhoods” and this was a silly play about no childhood at all. The audience, who were on holiday in Scarborough trying to avoid the rain, ran in gratefully and saw my play, which made the theatre money. It made me more money in one lump than I’d ever earned in my life! £33*, it was a fantastic amount! I went completely berserk and bought myself some more records!
Stephen Joseph realised he’d actually, like some freak accident of lightning striking, found himself an embryonic commercial writer and he encouraged me to write more. I, wanting to see more £33s coming in because by then I had a family and one child with another on the way, started to write comedies for Stephen and the first three or four all included exciting parts for me! And then as they went on I began to realise that possibly the one weak link in the plays was this bloke playing all the leads. So I recast them for another actor - to the eternal gratitude of the rest of the company, who were fed up with supporting me.

*Alan Ayckbourn has generally quoted a figure of £47 earned from The Square Cat previously.

Copyright: Simon Murgatroyd. Please do not reproduce any part of this interview without permission of the copyright holder.

Literary Habits

Alan Ayckbourn recently offered an insight into his current and favourite reading habits.
The article reprinted here - originally published in The Scarborough News - offers an insight into the literary habits of the playwright.

I am currently reading - or rather should I say exploring - Building Stories by Chris Ware. It’s not really a book in the conventional sense but an interactive novel. It comes in a box containing an assortment of pieces of printed matter in various shapes and formats. A good deal of it is in the form of cartoons but don’t get the idea it is kids’ stuff. It’s a long way from the Beano and occasionally contains what we delicately refer to these days as ‘adult themes’. The speech bubbles hold strands of fairly complex narrative and occasionally strong emotions with each separate section seemingly related to another (or maybe they aren’t at all, time will tell). A series of interwoven stories which may be read in any order. Fascinating and absorbing. And for someone who has spent a lot of his life experimenting with theatrical forms, particularly exciting.

My favourite author? When I’m not writing or rehearsing, I spend a lot of my time reading crime fiction. I tend to move from author to author, alighting on one and devouring their entire output. I’m currently half way through Ian Rankin’s splendid Inspector Rebus cycle. Before that it was Michael Connelly with his Harry Bosch. And before that were the Scandinavians, Jo Nesbo, Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo, Henning Mankell etc. etc. So my favourite author is usually the one I’m into at the time.

My favourite book? Undoubtedly Winnie the Pooh - with House at Pooh Corner a close second.