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| Intimate Exchanges: Quotes By Alan Ayckbourn |
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"When this company had done its last
performance of Way Upstream, in Houston in America, most of the
company were so exhausted by America that they all wanted a rest, except
Lavinia and Robin who were quite happy to carry on. It came to me that here
was the opportunity, without putting anybody out of work, to do my
two-hander that I'd always wanted to do. Here were two actors I'd worked
with for years and years, two people who would actually trust me, and I
could trust them, to do a play of an enormous nature. Sisterly Feelings
was a play in which there were alternative scenes in the middle but that was
a small scale version of what I really wanted to do, which was a play which
developed from one tiny little moment - whether a woman decides to smoke a
cigarette or not - into two separate second scenes, four choices of third
scene, eight choices of fourth and sixteen choices of fifth scene. To do
that hair-raising amount of material and ask two people to do it, to learn
the equivalent of half the bible, required an enormous act of faith. If I'd
carried that round the West End in a suitcase, which is what the scripts
would have needed, I don't think anybody would necessarily have bought it. "With the 16 endings I've been fascinated by choice. The fact from the little one's said about one's own life that apparently it's all been totally accidental. I didn't know Stephen Joseph from Adam. I just knew there was a job going in Scarborough, when I was chiefly concerned about my little props cupboard while working in rep in Leatherhead. And when he was ill and dying and I was a bit rudderless, I joined the BBC entirely by accident, to find myself sent to Leeds and into the lap of another remarkable man Alfred Bradley. He was very special and incredibly into new work, and there was I rolling around like a marble. If I'd rattled the other way, what would have happened? From the tiny choice about the cigarette in Intimate Exchanges we go into bigger choices until at the end we're talking about birth, death and marriage. The idea came and so the choice thing happened." (Marxism Today, March 1983)
"Although there are a number of variations performed every year I don't
think anyone has ever done all eight plays [since the original
production]....
"The play is really about a woman making the tiniest choice, but out of that
comes these endings when people die, get married or have children and all as
a result of this tiny ripple effect....
"They all finish with a certain dying fall, except for a couple that go up
in mood. In general, the point is that we do have free will and we can
choose, but we can't change unless we make a huge effort. Only Sylvie makes
a big change; she's the one who changes the most. If you don't change, you
just end up in the same place. How many men do we know who end up marrying
the same woman again and again! At the end of their lives, people who have
unsuccessful relationships will say weren't they unlucky in love but maybe
they were impossible to live with. Anyone who would marry Lionel Hepplewick
in Intimate Exchanges must be mad!"
"Have you ever reflected how those tiny
decisions we make every day of our lives – (Shall I take a raincoat today?)
can often require us to make further small decisions (Should I shelter in
this doorway?), that lead to larger decisions (Shall I accept this
stranger’s offer of a drink?) which then demand a really big decision
(Should we see each other again?), forcing you into those vast
decisions (Shall we share our lives together?), that finally lead to the
truly monumental decisions (Is it time we called it a day?)" |
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