The Time of My Life
with After the Orgy
Between Alan Ayckbourn and Jean Baudrillard

by Paul Davies

It would be hard to imagine a less likely coupling of contemporary authors - Baudrillard the savant of post-modernity and Ayckbourn the satirist of the aspiring middle classes - but nevertheless united they are in so far as they have both provided material for Volcano Theatre Company's last two shows.

In one sense Baudrillard is less surprising than Ayckbourn. Baudrillard's work, whether he likes it or not, has provided a kind of conceptual backdrop for much avant garde art in the 90s. (Baudrillard himself is reported to show little or no interest in theatre and it is likely that he would be even less interested, and probably quite mystified, to discover that his observations are sometimes being used to provide critical theatre practice with intellectual, even epistomological, foundations).

In After the Orgy, Volcano used Baudrillard's texts in relation to his intellectual grandfather Freidrich Nietzsche. What we were trying to do was to lay bare a geneaology of heresy. Having established this tradition of dissent (a dubious project in the history of ideas) we simultaneously sought to explore the essential fragility of the theatre form itself. After the Orgy celebrated, hopefully with a little brio, its own meaninglessness. It was a piece that made few concessions to the audience - with the actors refusing to acknowledge the public at the end (well was it the end, the dancer was still dancing...?) but bowing to the on stage camera. The point was not Brechtian. We have not exchanged textual chains of enslavement for technological ones. If there was a strategy at work within After the Orgy it was at most a determination to take a mischievous pleasure in the circularity of all things (commodities, texts and theatre).

Nothing, one might think, could be further away from the concerns of Alan Ayckbourn. For one of Britain's most successful and prolific of playwrights (53 n.o.) the importance of documenting a natural and ordinary language has always been an enduring and fundamental principle.

A far cry then from Baudrillard's refusal to authenticate anything other than a proliferating mass of signifiers. Talking with Ayckbourn about Volcano's forthcoming staging of his play Time of My Life it became clear that the process of establishing an authentic &characterful language was really at the centre of his dramatic method. (In Time of My Life the patriarchal father, Gerry Stratton was inspired by Robert Maxwell and some less than scrupulous Scarborough entrepreneurs. Many of Ayckbourn's characters derive from his favourite technique of listening to other people's conversations at restaurant tables.)

In contrast with this concern to articulate a language of realistic social intimacy Ayckbourn is also manifestly interested in the play of theatrical form itelf. When we were considering using an extensive amount of video in Time of My Life, Ayckbourn's agents were, as only agents can be, typically unhelpful. Ayckbourn himself was relatively unconcerned. He doubted whether it was necessary. One of his plays, he told us, had been performed by a Danish company inside a zoo. However having invested a considerable amount of his time and energy into the refurbishment of the Stephen Joseph theatre it seems unlikely that Scarborough will become the new home of site-specific work. Ayckbourn himself seems happier to experiment with time rather than animals. Unsurprisingly time is the structuring agent in Time of My Life. The play moves backwards and forwards in time as it tracks the effects of Gerry Strattons death on his family and friends. Other familiar motifs explored in Women in Mind and the Norman Conquests are the breakdown of language and the multiplication, confusion and tragedy of narrative exploration.

During our meeting with Ayckbourn there was no sense in which one felt that the drive to produce an authentic ordinary language necessarily entailed the usual carpets and armchirs that middle-scale presenters of his work seem to consider so absolutely essential. Between the two worlds of Ayckbourn's character-driven naturalism and an elastic conception of the written play there seems to be plenty of space for chance, risk and surprise. Ironically the terrain of post-modernity occupied by Jean Baudrillard which ostensibly offers so much scope for choice, invention and wizardry may in fact lessen the risk attatched to any (theatrical) choice and reduce, or negate entirely, the surprise that one choice is made rather than any other. Alan Ayckbourn's Time of My Life, a seemingly bizzare choice of text for Volcano to work with may offer more scope for those old fashioned theatrical virtues of chance, risk and surprise than Jean Baudrillard's poetic snapshots of a world spinning on its own images.

Mind you we haven't started rehearsing yet.....and I think I'll have another cup of tea. Your leader (Monday the 9th) was right to stress that 'Shakespeare is not a children's author'. I have not seen Michael Boyd's Dream but sympathise. Volcano are having similar difficulties with a two-handed adaptation of Macbeth which draws parallels between Macbeth and the lives and crimes of Fred and Rose West.

After our visit to Aberystwyth Arts Centre a correspondent described it as an "abortion of an adaptation". In Taunton it was "considered"........ And in Worthing it provoked one member of the audience to write to Chris Smith to demand that our grant be withdrawn. Our subsidy comes from the Arts Council of Wales.

I don't know why and how it got this bad for the bard. School and sometimes more general audiences seem to confuse a discussion of the literary merits of a particular Shakespearean text with the experience, practice and form of theatre. In this culture of inherited conservatism we desperately need risk, not hollow demonstrations of supposedly shared values.