Alan AyckbournCritiques

One of my very favorites.

A waste of time. The book is about grief and love, but it's so boring. I didn't care for the writing style. I'm assuming the translator took care to preserve the original Japanese style, though it's possible the translation is not very good.

Years ago a plague almost wiped out humanity and left all surviving females as carriers and all males as vulnerable to it. There had never been a cure - so the only way for the world to survive was to segregate the genders - women in the south, men in the north, no contact between them. Except for the pesky problem of pro-creation but artificial insemination takes care of that and when a boy is born, he is not vulnerable until puberty (or thereabouts) so a protocol had been created to ensure that boys are protected and move to the North when their time comes. Or so everyone believed. 50 years after the fall of the Divide, the novelist Soween Clay-Flin decides to tell the story of the fall of the Divide.

Using journal entries to tell a story has one big problem - the person whose diary is used is never there for everything. So instead of trying to work around that with author notes, the novel uses multiple sources - Soween's diary, her brother's Elihu's diary and the newspaper and council notes of the time. Elihu is one of the very few boys born into the all-female society - which allows both diaries to show the world from the eyes of both growing kids. The additional articles and extracts from official documentation and correspondence add the missing pieces in a story that leads to a place noone expects.

As women are the carriers and the plague kills any man in 10 days, the new order had convinced the women that they are responsible for the fall and enforces strict rules of behavior. And somehow the women at these times accepted it -- we never learn the full story of how the Divide came to be - we get the story as taught to the kids but even there, things don't always make sense. That separation of the genders also changes the idea of what is a normal relationship -- man/woman unions lead to death so they do not exist. Until Elihu falls in love that is.

It is obvious early in the novel that something is not right (and we know that the Divide is about to fall) - there are subtle clues here and there that the kids are not taught the whole story. Just how much of it they are not taught becomes clearer and clearer in time although the actual state of the world is revealed slowly and with a lot of red herrings along the way. And the end is heart breaking - even if the (in universe) foreword makes it clear that this is not a happy love story (if someone wants to read that as Romeo and Juliet in a post-apocalypses world, they won't be far off), the end hits hard. It is partially because all the earlier misdirection - Ayckbourn weaves a tale that makes you expect things to work out at the end. And they do - although not for everyone.

I am not sure what sounded scarier - the world as we saw it from the eyes of the two growing children or the world as we finally realized it to be later in the story. I would not want to live in either.

I liked this novel a lot more than I expected. The formatting (different fonts for each element) and the setup makes it look a bit weird but after reading it, I cannot imagine it being done any other way. If I have one issue with it, it is that I wish we had seen a lot more from the pre-history and from what exactly happened around the fall - the parts we saw were limited to what happened to our characters so it was never made clear how much of what everyone was taught was really the truth. Although the hints are there and maybe a summation is not really needed.½

For Murakami fans, this will be a disappointment, of course. Plenty of heartbreak and whimsy, but not much for overall structure or continuity. I think the translation was a bit inelegant. Worth the day it took to read, though.

Nicely crafted trilogy of plays, the same events viewed from three different vantage points; what seems a pat and somewhat dated ending for the first gets increasingly complicated until the third run through complicates the sexual politics that have gone before.

While this is not the top of Ayckbourn's portfolio, it does crackle with witty dialogue, much of which I didn't appreciate as much when I watched it as when I read it. The usual set up of a dysfunctional family tearing themselves apart over trifles, expanded in typical Ayckbournian fashion to retell the same story in three different locations. In each of the three plays, we see a different slice of a weekend, which means we get to see the story play out in different ways through different eyes. Ayckbourn should be a must read for any aspiring playwright, because he demonstrates so clearly what a difference location makes in a script, and also what a difference point of view can make.½

in this play, Ayckbourn does what he does best - shows us the world from multiple viewpoints. In this play, he doesn't do first one viewpoint, then another, he overlaps them. The setting consists of three different bedrooms. occupied by three very different couples. The action is driven by a couple who doesn't belong in any of the bedrooms, but insists on carrying on their dysfunctional marriage in all of them, creating havoc for the three other couples who rightly occupy those bedrooms. As they struggle to come to grips with their own marriage, their problems threaten the marriages of the other three couples. Not as uproariously funny as some of Ayckbourn's plays, but most of the comedy is sight gags, which can be difficult to capture fully in written form.½

What happens when three couples get together three successive Christmases? When it's in the hands of Alan Ayckbourn, hilarity ensues. Nothing much really happens, just little, ordinary events (with the exception of one repeated attempt at suicide, foiled accidentally each time by people who don't even realize the woman is trying to commit suicide). It's just sort of a day in the life, but that day happens to be Christmas Eve, and the lives just happen to be people who represent the oddments of human society, people who are relentlessly ordinary though imagining themselves to be more than ordinary. As such, most of us can relate to them in some way. The standard male/female dichotomy might seem strange to an audience in the 21st century, but it reflects the life as many experienced it in the 1970s, and while some might find it dated, it can serve as a good reminder of why we left so much of that behind us.½

The renowned playwright decides to tell us how he does it, so we can become renowned playwrights, too. Well, not exactly, but he does give tips and pointers for people who are creating plays; specifically, writers and directors. The first half+ of the book is devoted to writing, complete with "obvious tips", many of which are very humorous, except of course for the fact that they're true. The second half- of the book is devoted to directing. As someone who usually directs his own plays, he can address the concerns of both writer and director, and hopefully help you avoid some of the pitfalls of both. If you don't listen to him...well, don't blame him if you don't become as brilliant as he is. A quick read; three to four hours at most for an average to fast reader.

These two plays are intended to be presented together. They both tell the same story, from two different points of view. The first play shows what is going on in the house as a family falls apart during a summer garden party; the second play shows what's going on in the garden. It is a great reminder of how little we know about what we see around us; our viewpoint is often constricted to where we are at the time something happens, and what somebody else tells us about the rest. The plays are not as riotously funny as some of Ayckbourn's stuff, but there is a lot to work with; I suspect it would play funnier on the stage than it reads. Much of the humor in Ayckbourn is not in the words, but in what is happening between the characters, and the physical disaster that occurs in the play.

bookshelves: published-1986, mental-health, winter-20132014, radio-4, play-dramatisation, fradio
Recommended for: BBC Radio Listeners
Read from January 10 to 12, 2014

R4 Sat 11/1/2014

BBC description: Alan Ayckbourn's powerful tragi-comedy about a woman's mental breakdown, starring Lesley Sharp, Ben Miles, Owen Teale and Malcolm Sinclair.

Susan is a middle-aged woman, trapped in a loveless marriage to a smug vicar, and estranged from her son. After a minor accident with a garden rake, her mind starts to conjure up the perfect fantasy family. But the line between imagination and reality soon becomes alarmingly blurred.

Susan.....Lesley Sharp
Dr Bill Windsor.....Ben Miles
Rev. Gerald Gannet.....Malcolm Sinclair
Muriel.....Carolyn Pickles
Andy.....Owen Teale
Lucy.....Emily Beecham
Tony.....John Norton
Rick.....Harry Jardine

Directed by Emma Harding.

How many stories contain an Edward Casaubon charcter? I see this dry pedent all over the place.

Sad tale this, one I couldn't snigger at because I have known two people along my life's path that have descended into similar distressing states.

Sad, yet masterfully executed.
3.5*½

I don't often read plays, but my best friend told me she's taking part in this one, and as she lives in NZ so I can't go see her perform, I thought I'd read the play so I'd at least know what she was talking about. It's almost a Dean Koontz type story. Pretty good for reading, but I'm not too sure how it'd work on a stage.

This is the best (and most entertaining) book on writing I ever read. In fact, it might have been the only one I ever finished. Pure genius.

No QTP Stamp