Manic High

By T.E. Kalem

BEDROOM FARCE

by Alan Ayckbourn

Alan Ayckbourn is a master of frustration comedy. The funniest things happen to his people when they cannot do what they intended to do.

An elderly couple, Ernest (Michael Gough) and Delia (Joan Hickson), plan to celebrate their wedding anniversary at a restaurant. They end up snacking in bed. A thirtyish couple, Malcolm (Derek Newark) and Kate (Susan Littler), are throwing a party, but the guests' coats have scarcely been stacked on the bed when the festivities embarrassingly and ignominiously sputter out.

Still another couple, Nick (Michael Stroud) and Jan (Polly Adams), have accepted an invitation to the party, but Nick has suffered an agonizing back-muscle bind. The mutual intention of all three couples is to sleep peaceably in the three separate bedrooms that span the stage. It is not to be, to the playgoers' high manic hilarity.

The architects of the evening's comic chaos are a fourth couple, Trevor (Stephen Moore) and Susannah (Delia Lindsay), a pair of neurotic, egocentric twits who have the instincts of termites when it comes to reducing their friends' relationships to rubble. Trevor yearns to "communicate" though he cannot finish a simple declarative sentence, and Susannah gives herself pep talks on self-confidence with the assurance of a snowball crossing the equator.

An explosive offstage marital squabble between Trevor and Susannah wrecks Malcolm and Kate's party. After that the cancerous couple metastasizes. Susannah flees to the bedroom of Ernest and Delia, Trevor's parents, and gives Delia a hysterical display of the nocturnal hoo-ha's. Trevor cadges 40 winks on a sofa at Nick and Jan's, an excruciating indulgence, in Nick's helpless view, since Trevor had once been Jan's lover.

At dawn, the tarantula twosome slithers, separately, into the bedroom of Malcolm and Kate, and on encountering a rickety desk that Malcolm has spent all night assembling, Trevor, with one helping touch, reduces it to a pile of kindling. Ayckbourn is an alchemist of incipient disaster, and his absurdist humor cuts through the veneer of domestic tranquillity with a serrated edge. Yet his surgery is oddly healing, a kind of revelation through copious laughter and minimal malice.

The cast is a sparkling credit to the British National Theater, who have here exported some of their plethora of talent. You do not have to take Sir Freddie Laker's no-frills flights to see London's finest, and the laughs are nonstop. --T.E. Kalem

There were the actors, the lighting technicians and the stagehands, but who was that strange-looking man poking around backstage at the Brooks Atkinson Theater last week? Finally, one of the prop men had to know. "Look, who are you?" he asked. "You've been hanging around here for days." "I'm the author of the play," the man answered, "and I'm the director as well. You may not have noticed." "Well," retorted the prop man, "I can't say I did." It may not have happened that way, of course, but that is the way Alan Ayckbourn, the playwright and strange-looking man, likes to remember it. Not being noticed is his idea of bliss. "When I leave a room," he says, "I'd much prefer for nobody to know I've been in it."

In fact, that is not likely to happen very often. Most people instinctively watch Ayckbourn. Something is going on behind that face of vanilla pudding, but they are not quite sure what. If they had seen any of his 22 plays, however, they would know: Ayckbourn is watching them, his eyes alert for what he calls those "quick social embarrassments" that comprise the human comedy.

Ayckbourn never strays from the subjects he knows so well: English suburbia and the slightly sad, but always funny problems of the married, the formerly married and the soon-to-be unmarried. "It is a rich source of comedy," he says. "Everything that is most horrifying and wonderful happens in marriage." He should know. His mother, a novelist, divorced his father, first violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra, when Alan, the only child, was five. She married a bank manager, who did not hide his dislike of Alan. They were later divorced.

Ayckbourn married a young actress, Christine Roland, when he was 19 and fathered two sons, now 19 and 17. He and Christine separated several years ago, and Alan, who will be 40 next week, now lives with Heather Stoney, who is also an actress. His wife, Christine, has her own lover, and all four get along splendidly. Heather and Christine even take turns cutting Ayckbourn's hair; he is as frightened of barbers as he is of dentists. "People try to introduce me to my wife and get embarrassed when they find out we're married," he says, sounding like a character from an Ayckbourn play. "But it's all very simple. Nothing's been broken off, and we all like one another."

Terrified of cities, Ayckbourn lives in Scarborough, a resort on the North Sea, 230 miles north of London, where he and Heather have a converted vicarage. He is director of a theater-in-the-round with some 300 seats. He puts on new works and old, but every year, shortly after Christmas, he is certain of one production, a new play by Alan Ayckbourn. Some time in November he sharpens his pencils, gets out his pad of paper from Woolworth's and shuts himself up. Heather can tell when the time is approaching because "he gets slightly weirder and gradually slips into his night routine," writing from 9 p.m. until dawn. A week later he emerges with a new play. Some actually take only six days. One, The Norman Conquests, took eight, but that was a trilogy, so it should have taken 21. "One night," he told TIME's Gerald Clarke, "I finished two of the Normans at once. It was such a strain that I vowed to myself I would never do it again." Why does he write so fast? "I think it's because I don't like doing it very much. I want to get it over with. I write the play, and the moment it is finished it goes straight into production. Between writing and opening there is about five weeks. Then the play is in front of a Scarborough audience. They say, 'It may not be good, but it is new.' "

Though it is new to Broadway, Bedroom Farce is only his 18th play; his 21st, Joking Apart, just opened in London; and his 22nd, Sisterly Feelings, is on tour in England. Ayckbourn enjoys all kinds of games and puzzles--he has a vast game room in Scarborough--and his plays are like Chinese boxes. The Norman Conquests looks at the same people from three different angles; Bedroom Farce hops into three bedrooms; Sisterly Feelings has two third acts. From night to night no one, Ayckbourn included, knows which one will be played. At the end of the second act, one of the actors pulls a coin from his pocket and flips it on stage. Heads means the third will be played one way; tails means it will be played the other. Both scenes end in such a way that the fourth and final act stays the same. "People come to the theater to be entertained," he says, "and you always begin by saying, 'Once upon a time . . .' Then you start the maze."

Ayckbourn's aim is to write about serious matters in a funny way. One-liners terrify him even more than dentists and barbers. "There are not more than three funny lines in all of Bedroom Farce," he says proudly. At this point Heather confides his real ambition. "What Alan would like to do," she says, "is to write a funny King Lear." But with at least two third acts.

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