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 presenter Mishal Husain, which was broadcast on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 on 20 July 2021. Within it, the playwright discusses The Girl Next Door and his thoughts on the state of theatre moving forward.
BBC Radio 4: Today
Alan Ayckbourn: I think theatregoers will be naturally wary. Most of my audience - because of my extreme age - are also, if not quite as old as me, are certainly in that elderly bracket and I think they will still be wary of going back into a fully open situation. I think, let’s wait and see. I hope they’ll come back and I hope they’ll trust us to keep them safe.
You’ve had a productive lockdown.
Once lockdown occurred, the writer in me said, so what’s different? My normal writing method was to shut all the doors and not see anyone for weeks on end. So this was fine. I wrote four shows during that time. But the thing is, a play when it’s written it’s like it’s unfinished. It’s like a piece of music which never gets played, it’s like a picture which never gets seen. And the frustration of it suddenly got to me.
In The Girl Next Door, you do take the themes of the Covid Lockdown and contrast them with the Second World War experience. What are the parallels and contrast you see?
I was born in 1939 and the play itself [The Girl Next Door] is set in 1942, which was about the time I began to get conscious of the world around me. I remember sleeping in the Underground on my mother’s lap in a deckchair and remember thinking, this is a very strange world. But my mother kept saying, we’ll be safe here. And I can remember Doodlebugs going over and all that business. When it happened again with this Covid lockdown, I thought this is not dissimilar. In fact, my life has just come in a full loop. I began to get very interested in what was different, because it was different back then. You can’t compare the amount of sheer mayhem and terror that went on in London and the bombing and the raids and the Blitz. But, nonetheless, it was the same feeling of people coming together and saying, we can beat this.
So we’ve got this story of an actor - who’s thrown out of work and complaining about Lockdown and all this business - then he finds himself living next door to a 1942 girl in the garden, who’s coping and hanging out her washing, whose husband is away at war and her kids have been evacuated. She’s lost everything and she doesn’t understand at all what’s going on and it’s a sort of potential love story. The theme of the play is, I think, we go through these terrible patches and God knows we’ve been through enough of them in our lifetimes, that love carries on. There is a sense that love between people - or parents and children or two lovers - will continue and it’s much stronger than any of that.
You’ve spent so much time in these four walls and then suddenly to see a reaction from an audience to your work.
I was communicating again. It was like suddenly the phone was off the hook and I was talking. It was just wonderful. We sat there in the rehearsal room on my first day of rehearsal and we just looked at each other - half of us had masks on and half of us, the actors, didn’t - and I just said, we’re going to read this play now. And we could’t believe it was actually going to happen. I think we were all so moved by that moment.
It all started here for you in Scarborough, didn’t it?
Most theatres are in the middle of huge urban conurbations. Here, you can walk along the beach to work and that’s got to be a bonus. Or as my first manager said to me, ‘worth ten quid in you pay-packet, lad.”
As you became more and more successful, you never thought I need to be in London? Were there times you thought you needed to be down there?
I did hit and run raids in London because a lot of my plays went down there and eventually I went down there to direct them myself. I just thought the effort and the pressures got so much and I got too old for London. When you’re rehearsing in London, you spend the first fifteen minutes of the rehearsal exchanging views of the journey and the terrible trouble you had just getting to work. Here, you just go straight in!
If the past 18 months have been a test of our society, do you think we’ve passed it? Do you think we’ve passed it well?
I think we haven’t been particularly good. I think circumstances are so different these days. I’m very fascinated by the versions of the truth that are out there at the moment. I think if I have a new play in me, it is that everyone - thanks to Big Brother internet - has a version of what’s happening. One just doesn’t know what the truth is. Who’s lying? I don’t know the answer, I wish I did.