"One had this need to write about good and evil, much more clearly than normal. It certainly was a very different play but I didn't want everybody then to think I was going to write all these morality plays from now on. I think the next play I write is heading towards being quite farcical again. I think I want to have some fun. The great thing about Way Upstream at the National is the way it's being taken by audiences. It's like a children's matinee. By the time of the rainstorm and the fight when Emma and Alastair finally get away from Vince, they're whooping and shouting and clapping and behaving in a most un-National-Theatre-like manner. Audiences are taking it as I hoped they'd take it; it's riddled with all sorts of images but I hope above all they take it as a cracking good story. I think maybe some of the critics were leaning back. They weren't going to get involved. Maybe if you see too many plays you lose your innocence.
"It ends hopefully but I do think it needed to. It's so negative otherwise. I'm grossly depressed by the world and all that happens in it most of the time, and most of my plays about the human condition never resolve themselves at all. What cheered me was that my two small protagonists in it, having found their inner strength, also find the strength to go back. People started saying it was about the SDP, which I found very depressing. I hope one's into a bigger league than that. It's about people who don't say what they feel, and they should do, whether they're having a motorway driven through their garden or being persecuted by some monolithic state, or just being bullied by the man next door. I chose strange names because I wanted to slowly withdraw all the familiar comforts of civilisation. There is something very strange about going on boats anyway, because it doesn't have many laws. I also wanted to write about the nature of leadership, how some people automatically and erroneously assume leadership."
(Marxism Today, March 1983)

"I filch a lot from films. Way Upstream owes a lot to John Boorman's Deliverance. It's one of my darker ones - two couples going up river in a cabin cruiser and really nasty things happening. It's about the nature of leadership really. And it has quite an optimistic ending for once."
(The Irish Times, 22 January 1985)

"It was exciting with the 'Way Upstream' experience when various elements pulled together. We asked a local boatyard to provide a 'sawn off' boat, for instance, and local interest certainly caught fire with this show. It was not an easy project, and it was trial and error. It was a new technology to move bottomless boats with motors through water - albeit only ten inches of it. With a varying number of people on board it required a great deal of work with gears and motors. If the motor was too strong the boat shot water everywhere, and if it was too feeble it started to catch fire. Our poor engineer was rushing backwards and forwards trying different strengths of motor and various gearing When it worked, which thank heavens it did on the first night, there was a sort of sigh of relief from the entire audience followed by a huge round of applause. A sort of 'thank you, God' followed by applause."
(Lighting And Sound International, February 1988)

"I have a theory that plays are formed by several seeds coming together. It is very important to have a theme that you wish to pursue. Take a play like Way Upstream as an example. I wanted to write a play about the nature of leadership, and why some members consider themselves to be leaders and others don't, and the ones who do consider themselves to be leaders are obviously the ones who shouldn't be anyway, and the ones who don't consider themselves to be leaders would probably make very good ones if they put themselves forward. It's an ironic twist. Just to write a play with five or six people sitting in a living room discussing it would probably be very boring, but I got the idea of setting it in a cabin cruiser on the River Thames, because that is where the nature of leadership always comes out. You see these red-faced men in yachting caps shouting at their reluctant families 'Come along darling, tie up, tie up, come on!' That was three or four ideas in one play."
(The Haileyburian, Winter 1993)

"I wrote the play at a time when this country seemed to be in a constant state of unrest. Both political parties held extremist positions while the great majority of us stood irresolutely in the middle, reluctant to take a stand. I was also wondering then about the generation before mine who went off to war and who were tested. You often ask yourself if you’d be capable of showing the required courage in such a situation – ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I also wanted to write about good and evil much more clearly than normal.
A boat struck me as a handy symbol of society writ small; I used it as a pretext to examine the nature of leadership.
I have had some alarming experiences on such crafts – I ran my two sons aground on a couple of occasions and I once nearly lost my mother overboard but I am happy to say nothing ever occurred like the events that befall Alistair and Emma.
There are undoubtedly people in life who behave like Keith – those who automatically but erroneously assume leadership. And I think we all know one or two Alistairs and Emmas.
"Difficult to say whether I have a favourite character. All the characters have aspects of me in them – though I hope less of Vince! I think probably Emma. She starts out the complete underdog resigned to a whole voyage of cooking and cleaning. And finishes up the true captain of the ship."
(Alan Ayckbourn’s correspondence to students about the play)

"At the time of going to press all we have is the title and a brief description that the play is a tale of mutiny and piracy set aboard a cabin cruiser on a sleepy English river, but rest assured that the script will arrive in time for rehearsals, so don’t miss the opportunity of being among the first audience ever to see this new play from Alan Ayckbourn."
(The publicity note from the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round’s brochure for the original production of Way Upstream, vividly illustrating Alan still writing to late deadlines and the problems this caused the Press & Marketing Department among others).

Copyright: Alan Ayckbourn

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