Joking Apart: Articles

This section contains articles about Joking Apart by Alan Ayckbourn and other authors. To access the other articles, click on the relevant link in the right-hand column below.

This article was written by Alan Ayckbourn for the preface to Joking Apart & Other Plays published by Chatto & Windus during 1979.

Preface to Joking Apart & Other Plays

Just Between Ourselves, Ten Times Table and Joking Apart could be described as the first of my 'winter' plays. Unlike their predecessors, which were all written in late spring for performance during the Scarborough summer season, these three were all composed in December for performance in January. I mention this not because I am a strong believer that the time of the year wields some astrological influence over what one writes (though I would never rule this out either).

In a more practical way, though, this shift of my established writing pattern did, to some extent, alter my priorities. By the winter of 1975-6, the Scarborough Theatre-in-the-Round Company which I direct had made its first tentative steps towards a year-round playing pattern.

This had long been an ambition of mine. After twenty years or so of being
exclusively a summer rep. we were at last establishing some sort of deeper permanency within the town. To encourage and develop our much needed winter audience, I launched my latest play, Just Between Ourselves, at a time when it would, we hoped, do the most good for the box office. At the same time, the pressure that had always been on me to produce a play suited primarily to a holiday audience was no longer there.

As is customary, I wrote mainly at night - but this was my first experience of tackling a play whilst the North Sea storms hurtled round the house, slates cascaded from the roof and metal chimney cowlings were bounced off parked cars below my window, rebounding hither and thither like demented pinballs.

Not surprisingly, the result was a rather sad (some say a rather savage) play with themes concerned with total lack of under-standing, with growing old and with spiritual and mental collapse. Dennis, the husband, is no calculating villain. Nor is he, I contend, particularly unusual. Just a man pathologically incapable of understanding beyond a certain level. His wife's cries for help go unanswered not because he ignores them or fails to hear them but because he honestly hasn't the slightest idea what they're about.

The wife, Vera, hampered by a lack of ability to express herself clearly or maybe too inhibited to do so, suffers from a conventional upbringing that has taught her that the odds on her being wrong and her husband being right are high. Slowly, the last vestiges of self-confidence are drained from her. Vera sits empty, huddled and withdrawn in the garden, unwilling to go back into a house that is no
longer hers.

Occasionally, and I'm glad to say it is only occasionally, it has been suggested that the whole piece might benefit from a more cheerful ending wherein Vera miraculously revives and all becomes right with the world. Perhaps a few years earlier, I might have paid such suggestions serious attention. In resisting them and allowing, Just Between Ourselves to end as it does, I felt I took a large stride towards maturity as a playwright. It continued my small progress, first started in Absent Friends, towards my unattainable goal: to write a totally effortless, totally truthful, unforced comedy shaped like a flawless diamond in which one can see a million reflections, both one's own and other people's.

Ten Times Table, written exactly a year later, over Christmas which I missed completely that year, undoubtedly draws for its subject matter on experiences gained during 1976. We were due in October of that year to transfer from our present theatre home, the first floor of the Scarborough Public Library, to our new temporary housing, the far more commodious ground floor of the old Boys' Grammar School. For me, this entailed attending an interminable series of repetitive (and largely non-productive) committee meetings to finance and facilitate the move. Up till then, I had had little to do with committees. Little by little, their procedures and protocols began to intrigue, me. And particularly the people involved and the way they used these procedures. Put a man behind the wheel of a car, they say, and his personality really starts to show itself.

Similarly, a committee soon separates the goats. Apparent strong men weaken. Nonentities inherit the floor. Silent men gabble on inarticulately and to no point. Talkative men grow silent and merely emit low indecipherable moans of dissent and agreement.

Ten Times Table is a study of the committee person. It breaks a pattern for me in that I leave my usual domestic setting for the more public surroundings of the ballroom of the quite awful Swan Hotel, where everyone at some time must have stayed, much against their better judgement. The play could be described, suppose, as a predominantly sedentary farce with faintly allegorical overtones. In more innocent days, it would probably have been sub-titled a romp. Certainly, if in Just Between Ourselves I moved towards maturity, in Ten Times Table I reverted, happily, to my playwright's childhood.

Finally, Joking Apart which, at this time of writing, is my latest play and thus, naturally, my favourite of the three. I say naturally, since if it wasn't my favourite, I wouldn't have started it and certainly wouldn't have finished it. I have, at least, to convince myself I'm improving even if I fool no one else.

Looking at the play as objectively as I can, I do feel that it does go some way towards combining the truth of Just Between Ourselves with some of the fun of Ten Times Table. Its most significant feature is the time span it covers - twelve years from start to finish. The characters all age from their late twenties to their early forties, save one who starts in her late twenties and retreats to eighteen. For it's important when reading Joking Apart to remember that Melody/Mandy/Mo/Debbie are intended to be played by the same actress.

The play was written when the 38-year-old author was confronted by his eighteen-year-old son, who was suddenly adult and growing more so each passing day. I think with Joking Apart I began to feel my age.

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