Season's Greetings: Articles
This section contains articles about Season's Greetings by Alan Ayckbourn and other authors. Click on the links in the right-hand column below to go to the relevant article.This article was written by Alan Ayckbourn's biographer, Paul Allen, for the Stephen Joseph Theatre's 2004 tour of the play.
Season's Greetings
Articles by Alan Ayckbourn
○ Season's GreetingsArticles by Other Authors
○ Happy Christmas? (Simon Murgatroyd)It was certainly the kids that Alan Ayckbourn wanted to write about in the summer of 1980 as he settled down to his second major play set at Christmas. Eight years before, Absurd Person Singular had alerted critics all over the world to the fact that here was a writer who was much more than a boulevard comedian. Not only did the middle act consist almost entirely of a woman's attempts to commit suicide (wilfully misunderstood by all the guests at her own Christmas drinks party), but it had ended with a domestic bully being revealed as something more akin to a petty dictator. It was hilarious all right, but one of those comedies that provoke the now-legendary response from an audience member in Ayckbourn's home theatre in Scarborough: 'If I'd known what I was laughing at when I was laughing I wouldn't have laughed'.
In Season's Greetings, Ayckbourn has pointed out, 'I wanted to paint the rosier side of the picture. To write instead about log fires, Christmas trees, excited children's faces, candlelight, the holly and the mistletoe'. The home of Neville and Belinda Bunker has all these things and more, including kids. It's just that we never actually see the little ones. The kids Ayckbourn had in mind were ones at the 'awkward age' - between 25 and 70 - 'fighting over their toys, clamouring for attention, bullying, sneaking and crying, then kissing and making up and generally getting far too over-excited, as they do every year'.
The problem with adults, in much of Ayckbourn's work, is that they are every bit as greedy, self-obsessed and vindictive as children, and they have the extra ingredient of sexual hunger. Adding mistletoe and booze to this combination is like handing round the matches in a gunpowder shop.
All this, you might assume, Ayckbourn observed at first hand in his own childhood. He was already living much of his life through his imagination (watching films, writing embryonic plays to be performed by anyone close enough to hand) when his extremely Bohemian mother married her extremely conservative bank manager. At a succession of addresses in the country towns of Sussex, he had a close-up view of the kind of misery a hopelessly ill-assorted man and woman can dish out to each other when they are really trying. He generally took his mother's part, and the casual insensitivity with which husbands treat their wives is a running theme in his work. Sometimes couples who remain unmarried seem to make a better go of things, but in this play all the women are disappointed even if some have recognised it earlier than others.
But the way writers' lives turn into their plays is a complex thing, not least because so much of making art is instinctive, even unconscious. Ayckbourn didn't fully understand what he had written at the end of Absurd Person Singular until his technical dress rehearsal, when he put a spotlight on the small figure standing on a table and literally making everyone else dance to his tune.
Season's Greetings is rosier, give or take the odd gun-toting near-fascist and a doctor so inept he cannot tell if someone is dead or not, but life has filtered into it. Fast-forward from Ayckbourn's own childhood to another small boy waiting in another family home near Leeds for his increasingly famous father to return for Christmas. The boy has inherited his father's interest in drama and has created a puppet show for the family's entertainment; his father will perform it with him. But when they reach the climax of the piece, the strings of the boy's puppet - a dog - become entangled with the strings of the father's. Rather than stop the show, the father snatches the dog from his son's hands, rips the strings away and hands it back with only one paw still functioning. When the boy complains that this isn't much fun, the father reflects that 'fun is for amateurs'.
So is Uncle Bernard Alan Ayckbourn? Of course not. At least, not any more than the visiting writer enduring the usual banal questions about his ideas, or the husband too busy playing with his screwdriver to pay attention to his frustrated wife, or even the loathsome Uncle Harvey who is waiting for some kind of Armageddon on the streets of Britain: all these come out of Ayckbourn's psyche too. And Ayckbourn would never prepare a puppet version of the story of Ali Baba in which the Forty Thieves come on one by one, at ten-minute intervals. But the fury of Bernard's passion for his work, the dignified refusal to put sex and violence into The Three Little Pigs just because that is the children's diet on television and the fierce if temporary defiance of Harvey's destructive bigotry are all things you might catch him expressing in person.
So Season's Greetings, like much of Ayckbourn's work, is more personal than it sometimes looks. It had to be, because he was consciously defying his agent, the redoubtable Peggy Ramsay, who had made it very clear she didn't like plays about Christmas; and his usual commercial producer, Michael Codron, felt much the same. In fact Codron had just had his fingers burned with his ill-judged production of Ayckbourn's farce, Taking Steps, and was reluctant to take the next play on trust anyway.
Wary of the West End, Ayckbourn took Season's Greetings to the Round House, the former engine shed up the line from Euston Station where the great independent producer Thelma Holt was running an adventurous season. Being round, it replicated the shape of the various Stephen Joseph theatres in Scarborough that Ayckbourn has led. Unfortunately it didn't replicate its intimacy and Season's Greetings fizzled out in the huge space once animated by tons of steel, fire and steam.
And the play might have died there and then. But Greenwich Theatre, which had earlier relaunched The Norman Conquests to take the West End by storm when a trilogy had simply seemed impractical in the commercial theatre, now offered Ayckbourn a second chance with Season's Greetings. In March 1982 it transferred to Shaftesbury Avenue and Ayckbourn was wryly amused to see a play which had had a lukewarm reception at the Round House now described in large letters outside the theatre as simply 'his best'.
It is the plays that falter that Ayckbourn generally loves best, like sickly children. No wonder he wanted to do it again.
Copyright: Paul Allen. Please do not reproduce without permission of the copyright holder.