The protagonist of Alan Ayckbourn’s latest play never appears on stage. How so? Steve Wright finds out.

He is the English Chekhov. His protagonists are such real people; they are roles you just have to lose yourself in.” This verdict on Alan Ayckbourn, aka Britain’s most prolific and successful living dramatist, comes from someone who knows what they’re talking about: actress Liza Goddard, who’s performed in six of the great man’s plays over the past eight years, including three world premieres on his home turf, Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre.

Liza’s latest role comes in Ayckbourn’s 74th play ‘Life of Riley’, premiered at SJT last autumn and now touring. She plays Kathryn, a fortysomething married dental receptionist who, like everyone else we meet in the play, has a strong personal connection to the mercurial figure of George Riley, a man whom we never meet (and whose funeral ends the play) but who casts a strong spell on the lives of all around him.

A charmer, free spirit and something of a troublemaker, Riley is the focus of all the regrets and yearnings of those around him, characters who themselves have led more conventional lives. With a few months of his life remaining, Riley’s closest friends remember – with passion, nostalgia or occasional bursts of downright fury – how deeply he has affected all their pasts. George, though, is plotting one last final farewell which threatens to upset all their futures.

“I wanted to put Riley at a distance and see what other people were doing in his absence,” Ayckbourn himself explains of this unusual plot device. “When people are in a group and you split up, it can have terrible consequences – not only for the couple but also for those around them, who look at their own marriage and think, ‘My God, I thought they were happy; what does that say about our marriage?’ In this play, it does cause everyone to look at their own relationships, which is a nice way for George to depart, having sorted out his friends’ lives.”

Riley’s funeral is the moment of a dawning realisation, for all those around him, that their lives have somehow drifted off course. “It's a play about reactions. A lot of writers write about road accidents,” Ayckbourn observes. “I write plays about standing at the side of the road and reacting to the accident.”

“I’ve been very lucky,” Goddard reflects of her recent connections with the playwright, a spell of roles which, she says, has rekindled her faith in stage acting. “He’s one of our greatest playwrights ever. The man’s a genius, not just as a writer but as a director. To work with him as a playwright and director has regenerated my belief in acting, which I had lost – I had forgotten why I did it, and this kind of emotional truth is the reason.”

Kathryn is, Goddard explains, “a force to be reckoned with. She’s queen bee of the local am-dram society – and she’s married to Colin, a meek, mild slip of a man whom she puts down relentlessly.” Playing these roles for the first time – thus, in collaboration with the playwright, creating them – must be an appetising challenge. But how much input does she get to provide? “Alan allows you to be creative, but within a very firm framework. You don’t change anything – a comma, at the very most.” The opposite, in short, of the Mike Leigh rehearsal process, where character development is achieved during rehearsals in an ongoing dialogue between director and cast. “Alan knows absolutely who these people are, down to the last punctuation mark. He knows exactly what these people are feeling, so he gives you this thick stash of notes – I’ve basically got a blueprint of how to play the part, exactly what Kathryn’s thinking and feeling at any moment.”

Interesting, too, that the play builds up – via others’ variously emotional accounts of him – so complete a picture of a protagonist who, himself, never actually appears. “Everyone’s vision of Riley is completely different. All the women in the play [with whom he has been variously entangled] provide different views from different angles, so that the audience gets a full, 3D picture of him.”

Is this the play’s overarching theme, then? “Yes – it’s essentially about how we appear to other people, and the fears and anxieties that that creates. Also, like most of Alan’s plays, it’s simply about relationships – and how, in long relationships, people may say and do one thing, and yet be thinking something else entirely, but never acting on it. And there is a dark side, as there is to all of his plays – the darkness of ordinary people. People missing chances, and then thinking, ‘hmmm, perhaps I could have done better’. Riley is a free spirit, has always done what he wanted, lived life to the full – and that can make others feel regretful.”

LIFE OF RILEY WAS AT THEATRE ROYAL BATH IN FEB. FOR REVIEW CLICK HERE.
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2011; pics Tony Bartholemew 

Tweet