The Girl Next Door: Interviews
This section contains interviews with Alan Ayckbourn about his play The Girl Next Door. Click on a link in the right-hand column below to access the relevant interview.This is an interview with Alan Ayckbourn by the radio presenter Jonathan Cowap, which was broadcast on BBC Radio York on 4 May 2021. Within it, the playwright discusses The Girl Next Door and his thoughts on the state of the arts in 2021.
Jonathan Cowap Interview Alan Ayckbourn
Alan Ayckbourn: I’m very excited by the thought. I’m a little bit anxious because I haven’t been in a rehearsal room for more than a year, which is the longest time I think in my living memory that I haven’t not rehearsed something. I’m sure I shall get the knack and back into the swing very quickly, but I may have forgotten how to do it!
I don’t think you will! Is it a bit like riding a bicycle, you’ll be five minutes in and you’ll think, what was I anxious about?
Yes, probably! The excitement, of course, is just the new play and it’s jolly nice writing and all that, but it’s a bit lonely. I’ve been alone writing for the past year and I’ve sort of run out of steam a bit. Playwriting is a very gregarious writing occupation, I supposed as opposed to novel writing when novelists just sit there - I don’t know how they do it - they sit there on their own and finish book after book after book and the only person that reads it - apart from the public, of course - is the publisher.
I get immediate feedback. The actors first of all - they often get a bit critical…
Is it a bit like you’ve created something and you’re waiting for other people to breathe life into it?
Yes. Until the actual magical ingredients are added, all I’ve got is an empty mixing bowl really. I’ve made the mixing bowl and then the ingredients go in and one of the first ingredients, of course, is the performers and there’s the designers and the sound designers and the lighting designers and so on. It’s a huge team that goes in to make a play. I’m at the beginning of the chain but fortunately I’m the director, so I’m somewhere in the middle of the chain too. Eventually you deliver it to the final ingredient, which is - of course - the audience.
This is a new play and this is number 85, where do the ideas keep coming from?
Well, I don’t know. I just wait for an idea. Once I’ve got an idea, am comfortable with it and think it’s a goer, I can then run with it. It’s where the ideas come from - and that’s always a mystery.
Give us a taste of what The Girl Next Door is about.
It’s a love story. I was trying to respond to the mood of the country at this time. I think everybody is just a little bit exhausted really and I didn't want to write anything desperately heavy. It’s a timeless love story and it does involve time and it has my usual ingredients of slightly being bittersweet and a bit nostalgic. It’s probably quite a gentle and quite a funny play, I hope.
Part of it is set in lockdown, so we’ve got a central character who’s an actor - a middle-aged actor who’s sitting around really getting bored to tears because his work has dried up altogether, as has happened to so many actors. He’s driving his sister, who lives with him in lockdown, absolutely crazy because she works for the Treasury and is on Zoom meetings. Her one amusement is dressing from the waist upwards. She’s in cabinet meetings, sitting there with her pyjama bottoms on. So she’s quite amused by it all.
What do you think about theatre audiences? Do you think people are excited about coming back to the theatre or do you think they’re going to need some coaxing and cajoling?
I think they may be a fraction apprehensive but I think the mood will be, 'Oh thank God'. People need people - that’s the old cliché. Theatre brings people together. All this downloading and filming of shows, it’s not the same. You need to sit and watch a good stage play, you need a few people around you having a good time with you or at least sharing the experience. Also, of course, sharing the experience with the actors. My sort of theatre - the Stephen Joseph sort of theatre - is exactly that. It’s no vast arena, there’s no big old fashioned Victorian theatre where you sit 300 feet from the actors if you’re in the Gods. We’re all in the same room and it’s very important and proximity is the name of the game really. One of the joys of theatre-in-the-round is you sit within feet of the performer; within feet of other people and seeing what the performer is doing and sharing that and reacting with other people. And that is just anathema to Covid - that’s exactly what you don’t want.
Do you think the absence of the arts, the absence of entertainment, of music and theatre and galleries and musicals, whatever it might be, do you think if it’s done anything it’s emphasised that we need these things and it may have sharpened our hunger for them because we now know what it’s like to live a life deprived of them?
That’s right. You don’t miss a thing until it isn’t there. If anything we’ve learnt from sitting and watching television and radio and listening to people out there, what everyone is saying is,' I want to get back, I want to see my friends, I want to be with people. I want to be around whether it’s a huge rock concert or an intimate theatre performance.' I mean if you sit in a room on your own for long enough, you may begin to doubt you’re even human! That's the trouble. If you’re talking to some remote control device like Alexa or something like that long enough, you’ve probably got real problems of personality and people’s personalities, I sense, are beginning to drift away from them.