|
|
|
|
|||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Absent Friends Quotes By Alan Ayckbourn |
|
"I mean how can we expect the audience we get
to laugh at something like death? Then I realised the one section of people
guaranteed to laugh at death are the old. They are the ones who have to come
to terms with it."
"My latest play, Absent Friends, contains the double theme of death and the death of love. It also has a woman having a nervous breakdown. It's a comedy and people are laughing at it. Not I believe, in a cruel and heartless way, but with the laughter of understanding. Laughter in the theatre can be an amazing bridge. It can persuade people to keep their minds open long after their inherent prejudices have told them to close them." (New York Times, 20 October 1974)
"Like in Absent Friends this man
genuinely wants to sort these people out, but the fact is they don't want to
be sorted out. What he's saying they know, and don't want repeated, but his
motives come from a genuine affection. I tend to be optimistic about people
anyway. I always assume they're nice until they've finally stolen my
wallet. I believe basically that most people do bad things to each other
mainly because of fear."
"It is much more of a character play than I
have written before and has less of a watertight plot."
"I am not very good at funny lines but I am
quite good at presenting characters in a situation when viewed from the
outside is funny but on the inside isn't. I was rather pleased with Absent
Friends - pleased to get comedy without actually working for it."
"One can go on forever being a precocious
juggler of shapes and patterns; I hope not too many people think that this
time I've slipped up on the job of farcical comedy when that's not what I
was aiming for at all. I've gone round all the jokes, deliberately stopped
at points where, perhaps, one could have broadened into more obvious farce.
I was trying to do something much more low-key. It seemed to me that, if I
was going to progress as a dramatist, I must try and get more comedy from
character and less from artificially induced situations. At the beginning of
the second act of Living Together the whole action pulled up with a
jolt and the family sat and talked and read magazines. I'd never done that
sort of thing before, with people just sitting and talking about themselves.
Writing it, I felt nothing was actually happening; and it was wonderful to
get it onto the stage and find a response coming off the audience. So I went
back to Scarborough and attempted to write something that would involve the
audience in an afternoon."
"I have soft spots for certain ones, but
that may just be because they are not able to take care of themselves.
Normans is perfectly all right. They are quite happy and can take care
of themselves. Absent Friends I tend to stroke, because it's rather
special. When it does work for someone in the audience and for an actor it
works probably better than any of the others, but one was aware writing it
it was never going to be a play that was going to appeal to a very broad
spectrum. With Absent Friends I deliberately laid down all the safe
apparatus one uses to ensure that something works. I can modestly now write
a scene technically, a fast scene I know, which mechanically will make
people laugh. I can write enough jokes into it to make it work. In Absent
Friends one almost said no, I won't use that and I won't do that. It's
like fighting and saying 'I'm not going to use my right hook because I know
it's very strong, I'll use my left'. It sounds as if I deliberately tried to
write a bad play, which wasn't actually true. I tried to write something
different, and it's always dangerous because if you do change your spots,
having gathered a fair public, you can make them very offended. It was not
ever intended to be cruel, I think it does come over at the moment as being
rather a savage play. I suppose it started with Absurd Person Singular. The
ending is certainly a bit sour and I think really it's a two-fold thing.
First, one matures. I feel I've got a fuller range of emotions now than I had
when I started writing at 19, and I hope a greater understanding of people
derived from being around them a bit more. Secondly, having written 19
comedies altogether you get to a stage, where you've done most of it. Once
you've established, which you can do fairly easily, that you can make people
laugh over an evening, then you start to say now what about the quality of
the laughter. It's very easy to get easy laughter. There's nothing like
telling your audience an old joke to make them laugh. They love old jokes,
woe betide the man who ever invents a new joke, he won't get a titter. Then
you start to say 'well, in what other areas can I extend my craft?' One of
the areas I wanted to write about, because it was a personal situation, was
not about death itself but about people's attitudes to death, a very
dangerous area to write comedies about. I'm dealing in topics which I
suppose themselves are quite serious, but viewing them, I hope, in a
sympathetically comic way. I believe that there's not a lot, excepting
national and local disasters, that you can't say through comedy. There are
specific touchy zones, obviously, which would be just bad taste. But most
human existence, even if it's somebody trying take their own life, it is
possible to see - in a sense - in a comic way, and let the whole impact of the
actual deed also sour the sugar."
"None of the characters in Absent Friends is directly modelled on myself or specific people I know. Obviously, any writer uses aspects of himself in his writing and draws from observations of people around him but it would be impossible to itemise the input. I did know of a girl whose future husband died in an accident and from that day on, she based her life on the assumption that their relationship would have been perfect if it had been allowed to happen. This might well have been true but as it was never asked to withstand the ups and downs of everyday life it was never put to the test. I suppose I have used he indirectly to create the character of Colin who is unutterably smug in his belief that he and Carol had the perfect relationship. And, consequently, although he thinks otherwise is unable to begin to understand the lives of his friends close to him." (Personal correspondence, 1988)
"Absent Friends is set in a lounge because I wanted to use 'real' time on stage i.e. what you see happening during the course of the play occurs in the time it actually takes you to watch it. Most plays take liberties with time which we accept. In this instance, by gathering a group of people together in the same room and at the same time, one could build up the tensions and inter-relationships before your eyes, and a formal tea party offered a nice counterpoint to the drama that was really going on beneath the surface." (Personal correspondence, 1988)
"It's an open ending. Love has finally died between Diana and Paul - or rather finally been declared dead. I think there hasn't been much life left in it for some time but often we go on going through the motions of love, as if we loved someone, because the truth is too painful. It takes a catalyst like Colin to force us to review our lives. On the other hand, life goes on. In the face of everything, we continue to live our lives and even look forward to tomorrow." (Interview, 1999)
"The dying fall ending is deliberate. It seemed, when I was writing the piece, the only honest ending. It would have been possible, I suppose, to bring Diana back which would have lifted the thing to a more conventional "grand finish". But I think in performance, the end is sort of inevitable, particularity if the thing is pitched on a very low key as intended." (Personal correspondence)
"It's very short so you can explore the silences. I once described the play as a comedy of embarrassment - and the best embarrassments can both grow out of and then cause silences." (Personal correspondence)
Copyright: Alan Ayckbourn |
|
Interview With Alan Ayckbourn by Simon Murgatroyd |
| Simon Murgatroyd:
Absent Friends is now seen as a pivotal point in your playwriting
career, what are your opinions of it? Alan Ayckbourn: It’s an interesting play for me because one sees certain plays in the chain as turning points, where I felt I took a positive step in a new direction. I’m rather fond of it because of its significance. When I got to The Norman Conquests, there was a moment when I ran out of plot – as all three plays are reliant on each other. It was a moment, I realised, when I had to have nobody doing very much. I was very nervous about that scene, just people sitting down and talking about their relationships. It sort of led me to write a play with a lot less visible action. SM: Was there any other inspiration behind writing a piece that, arguably, was a big departure for you? AA: It was actually inspired by a real event and to that extent it’s quite unusual, as I rarely write about an event from life. A friend had lost someone dear to them in terrible circumstances. A group of us had invited her around and she was better than we were. The tables were turned and our slightly strained relationships showed signs of breaking up instead. I realised this was good dramatic material and was rather guiltily putting it all away. SM: Were you worried about how the original audience might deal with such a different approach from you and of the subject matter? AA: I remember when I did it in the Library Theatre, being very nervous about it before the audience came in, as it didn’t have all the things I had become known for. People are now more used to that tightrope between embarrassment and laughter, which is the hallmark of the play. SM: What led to the decision to revive it? AA: It’s a very difficult play to do and I really wanted to do it again and set the record straight about what sort of play it was. I had the feeling it had got misinterpreted – normally through direction. It has a very delicate balance; it has the appearance of being a completely flat surface, quite clean. But when you dig under, it’s quite alarming what’s going on because everybody’s being terribly polite. Hopefully the audience is saying ‘Good Lord, what’s going on under there?’ It’s quite distressing by the end. SM: Are you approaching it differently to how you did when you first directed it in 1972? AA: I think I’ve brought something new to it as a director, which is a certain confidence, because originally it was such a new direction for me as a writer. It fortunately worked; now one has the confidence to approach it and say we’re going for it. The darker I make it, the funnier it becomes. It’s a comedy of embarrassment and I think it still remains funny. SM: Absent Friends is the first play where you really deal with a dark, even a taboo subject. What were you trying to achieve in writing about death in the play. AA: It looks at how we treat death. All the great farce writers used sex as a taboo incessantly and that really has past it’s shock value now. At the moment people are relying on violence as shock. We’re reaching the point though where we’re going to have to find a way to shock through ideas, not exploding heads; Absent Friends is shocking in the way it deals with death, how we treat death. It is deliberately about a girl you don’t see, as far away from the centre of the action as you can get. Most of the characters don’t know her and have never seen her. It’s about our attitude to death and how we very easily become convoluted in our statements about it. They’re coping as best they can which is often in an apparently unstable manner. Somewhere in there, they haven’t learnt to deal with that sort of pain. I remember the death of Sophie Winter* here was devastating. It totally flattened the company, although some of us were pretty sure we could cope with it. But there was an extraordinary feeling that your emotions wouldn’t allow you to cope. I realised I had no preparation for that at all. Of course you don’t. SM: But it’s about more than death… AA: It’s about our inability to cope, but it’s less about death than of the death of love. * Sophie Winter was an actress at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, who died prior to the final performance of Alan’s A Word From Our Sponsor in 1995. Copyright: Simon Murgatroyd 1997 |
|
If you have enquiries about this play or any other aspect of this website, please contact the administrator at: admin@alanayckbourn.net. |
