Is Alan Ayckbourn Our Best Living Playwright?

By Richard Zoglin/London

British playwright Alan Ayckbourn has long been the theater's champion daredevil, a man who never saw a stage stunt he wouldn't tackle. One of his early works, The Norman Conquests, was a cycle of three plays that recounted the events of a weekend from three different parts of the same house. One Ayckbourn play moves backward in time. Another conflates all the action in a house, from living room to attic, into a single stage space. His ingenious, nearly unstageable Intimate Exchanges has 16 permutations, depending on the choices made by characters at key points in the action.

So the gimmick of House and Garden, the two Ayckbourn plays currently being presented at London's Royal National Theatre, should come as little surprise. Set in the house and garden of an English country estate during one long afternoon, the plays are performed in two separate theaters by the same cast at the same time, the actors scurrying back and forth from one theater to the other. When a character chases offstage after his dog in House, he turns up a minute later in Garden; when a jilted woman enters with a limp and dark glasses in House, you find out only when you see Garden what mishap befell her.

It's an audacious, crazy, altogether brilliant achievement. Each play works on its own (although House is better than Garden), but each enhances the other. House revolves mainly around the shaky marriage between Teddy Platt (David Haig), the estate's owner, and his wife Trish (Jane Asher), who is giving him the silent treatment after discovering his affair with next-door neighbor Joanna (Sian Thomas). Teddy is desperate to patch things up before a prominent, politically connected writer arrives for lunch, presumably to urge him to run for Parliament. In Garden, we see Teddy ham-handedly break off his affair with Joanna, who goes steadily bonkers in the midst of preparations for the annual summer fete. Shuttling in and out of both plays are Teddy's precocious teenage daughter and her rather dim suitor; an alcoholic French actress on her way to the rehab clinic; a bizarre trio of household servants; another couple whose marriage is on the rocks; a children's maypole dance; and a driving rainstorm.

The laughs are plentiful, but the comedy, as usual in Ayckbourn, is tinged with pathos and pain. The bluff, insensitive Teddy barrels over the women in his life like a speeding London taxi. Giles (Michael Siberry), the sweetly clueless next-door neighbor, is the last to learn of his wife's affair and the first, pathetically, to forgive her. Ayckbourn has made a specialty of portraying people who are too dull-witted, or self-absorbed, or obsessed with social niceties, to comprehend the wreckage around them. The boozing French actress (Zabou Breitman), after a fling with Teddy, lets loose a torrential confession in a language he doesn't understand. "I don't think I've ever talked like this with anyone," he says, touched. Precisely.

This mix of emotions, the intricate tightrope walk between comedy and tragedy--Ayckbourn's greatest feat, really--may be why his work has got short shrift in America. Early in his career, after such West End (and occasional Broadway) successes as Absurd Person Singular, Ayckbourn was labeled, patronizingly, the "British Neil Simon." But as his plays have grown darker and more complex, Broadway has largely abandoned him. Although Communicating Doors, one of his lesser comedies, had a successful run off-Broadway a couple of seasons back and Comic Potential, his latest West End hit, will be produced this fall by the Manhattan Theatre Club, most of Ayckbourn's great comedies of the past couple of decades--Man of the Moment, Henceforward, The Revengers' Comedies, Wildest Dreams--have been performed only rarely in the U.S., and not at all in New York City.

To be sure, American productions of Ayckbourn are usually botched; directors tend to broaden the comedy and stomp all over the delicate (and very British) nuances. It's as if they still believe that silly Neil Simon tag. Better to compare Ayckbourn--who, at 61, has written nearly 60 plays and directs them himself--to another artist whose work was misunderstood in his lifetime, Alfred Hitchcock. Both worked in popular genres that had few pretensions to art--the suspense thriller and the domestic comedy. Both were technical virtuosos who loved to set themselves challenges in their chosen medium. And both managed to entertain audiences while exploring the most profound questions of human relations and values. Most filmgoers, of course, now realize that Hitchcock was far more than just the "master of suspense." House and Garden might just help Ayckbourn finally get his due as a major theater artist. On either side of the Atlantic, he's simply the best we have.