Way Upstream (by Anthony Curtis)
"Alan Ayckbourn's 26th play is set aboard a cabin-cruiser on a sleepy
English river. The Scarborough arena has been filled with several inches of
mild-coloured liquid to simulate the water-way, while moored alongside a
hummocky, grassy bank is a spanking little craft with cabins fore and aft,
plus it seems all the standard fittings. They include an engine that makes
the right sound and a cooling-system that spews fluid realistically out of
the exhaust.
Once the play gets under way the manoeuvrability of the vessel proves to be
considerable; even more so is the ingenuity of the stage-staff who arrange
for it to glide under bridges with an echo-effect, pause at locks, weigh
anchor in the moonlight, and tie-up beside a private island with its own
little wooden jetty. One wonders how all these marvellous happenings could
possibly be recreated in the proscenium stage of some conventional London
theatre.
Meanwhile the challenge to the playwright's virtuosity in keeping a cast of
seven happy under such cramped conditions, as quite a complicated story
unfolds during the seven days and nights of the voyage, is one which
Ayckbourn handles with insolent ease. He begins by placing two married
couples aboard in the midst of a blazing row between Keith (Robin Bowerman)
and his wife June (Carole Boyd). The two men are business partners, and the
two women a contrast between the predatory and the pure.
Some hilarious knockabout comedy occurs as the holiday quartet explores the
ship and eventually turns in for the night with pyjamaed figures popping up
through open hatches. Here are all the ingredients of a ripping nautical
farce: but this playwright has long since ceased to be content with mere
farce. As the vessel proceeds upstream it turns away from Pinero-land and
enters J. M. Barrie country.
In other words, we witness a contest between the Weak and the Strong in
which ultimately the Weak (or should one say Meek?) prove to be stronger
than the Strong. Alistair (Robin Herford) and Emma (Lavinia Bertram) the
second couple, know absolutely nothing about boats and are content to take
orders from the blustering Keith who revels in his role as skipper. However,
he has his problems ashore as the work force in his factory prepare to
strike; daily visits from his secretary (Susan Uebel) keep him abreast of
the situation.
The holiday-makers are forced to take aboard a sinister stranger Vince
(Graeme Eton) to get them out of the mud during Keith's absence. After a few
drinks, a fascinating power-struggle and sex-struggle fuelled by Vince's
girlfriend Fleur (Gillian Bevan) develops and we have left conventional
farce a long way behind as we watch a kind of up-dated adult version of
Peter Pan with Vince as a modern Captain Hook and the quietist Alistair
forced into violence when his wife is made to walk the plank. To ram home
his point the playwright calls their final destination Armageddon Bridge.
The last half an hour of this play is going to give trouble to many of
Ayckbourn's loyal admirers. It may well be the most daring thing he has
done."
(Financial Times, 14 October 1981)
New Comedy Turns Dark (by Eric Shorter)
"The stage is filled with water. The setting is a riverside, complete
with landing stage, grassy banks and capstans. And the chief property is a
motor boat which chugs discreetly about the Stephen Joseph
theatre-in-the-round at Scarborough to give Alan Ayckbourn his most novel
setting yet in his new comedy, "Way Upstream."
This is bound, like nearly all his plays, to sail eventually into the West
End. For as well as the fascinating charm of the boat on the water, there is
the humour of a comedy about shared holidays: two married couples who go
boating for 10 days with only one keen sailor among them, and he has got it
all from a book.
But although Mr Ayckbourn has his usual fun with these landlubberly husbands
and wives coming to terms with life aboard a cramped two-cabin cruiser, he
introduces a third couple. Their intimidating confidence and adventurous
morals disconcert not only our holidaymakers but also the nuance of the
comedy, which suddenly goes quite dark and devious.
For this mysterious couple take over sexually and nautically the hired
vessel and its occupants, as if they were pirates. There is a mutiny. There
is violence and bloodshed, and a romantically happy ending.
Mr Ayckbourn has cast portentous shadows over his plays, before: but this
time there is something less successful about it as if he sensed that we
might be having too cosy a time laughing at the discomforts of these
suburban sailors and wanted to shake us into realising that even the most
agreeably work-like men, can, when provoked, become heroes.
It shakes us all right, because a drawing room comedy-on-the-water seems to
drift up an eerily dangerous creek which borders on fantasy.
But the comedy is for the most part a joyous, and typically perceptive
display of the English temperament under strain, struggling to face each
challenge with dignity, or ducking out of it ostentatiously. One is hooked
from start to finish. And I have never seen the Scarborough company in
better form. Under Alan Ayckbourn's own direction. Robin Bowerman, Robin
Hertford, Lavinia Bertram, Carole Boyd, Graeme Eton, Gillian Bevan and Susan
Uebel show themselves to be an admirable team, suggesting that a permanent
company for light comedy, even when it threatens to turn black, can be as
important as far more serious drama. Let us hope that when play moves south,
it moves with the same players."
(Daily Telegraph, 5 October 1981)
Way Upstream (by Desmond Pratt)
"Ponder for a moment on the last 25 plays of this master craftsman, and
listen to his subjects to appreciate the full agility of mind and variety of
thoughts which must populate his "little grey cells."
We have had devastating Christmas celebrations, a traffic jam in Greater
London, a mute piano tuner. There have been extra-marital unbliss;
disastrous anniversaries, ghastly weekend house-parties, do-it-yourself
maniacs and even a house fashioned into a single stage space. Now, in his
26th play, he leads us aboard a cabin cruiser on a sleepy English river and,
I can't not resist the reference, "up the creek."
Trying to unravel the convolutions of an Ayckbourn farce in cold print is a
tortuous business.
Here we have a real cabin cruiser on the stage in ten feet of water. It is
taking two business partners and their wives up the fictitious River Orb
through seven locks, at each of which an event happens wilder than the one
before. Needless to say, the ship's destination is a bridge called
Armageddon.
Neither couple are particularly well matched. Keith (Robin Bowerman, in a
strong performance of great self-opinion and bombast) assumes the captaincy
of the ship as he has the head of the business firm on land.
Carole Boyd, as his wife, has a smooth way of mixing her boredom with her
seductive attractions when required into a dangerous cocktail of sex.
The second wife, Lavinia Bertram, has the energy and enthusiasm of a nice
infant with petulant outbursts. But it is in her husband Alistair that
Ayckbourn has penned one of his wonderful semi-speechless studies of the
ineffectual hesitant flounderer, and how beautifully Robin Herford explores
his helpless world of unspoken emotion and retains the charming idiocy and
insufficiency with a delightfully light touch."
(Yorkshire Post, 5 October 1981)
Nudity On Stage (by Lynne Curry)
"SHOCK! HORROR! SCANDAL! Nudity has arrived in Scarborough. There on the
waterlogged stage of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round last night
Robin Herford and Lavinia Bertram revealed all in the name of art.
But then, when it comes to your 26th play, finding new schemes to make your
audience sit up and gasp must take some doing.
Alan Ayckbourn has done just that in "Way Upstream", his newest play,
which had its world premiere last night.
For a start, the main prop - indeed, about the only prop - is a real live
boat, floating on real live water and offering the threat of a real live
bootful for any member of the audience who puts a foot wrong in finding his
seat.
Then there is the complete diversion from the style for which Ayckbourn is
renowned. Gone is the harmless farce with a dash of profundity and a liberal
dose of exaggerated characterisation.
This is a play with a Message, and that Message takes over increasingly from
the quick-fire humour and idiocy of the individuals.
Finally, there is The Nude Scene, which certainly gives a boost to any
respiratory system that has lapsed by now into overdrive.
The starting point for this play is a holiday afloat, bringing together
company director Keith (Robin Bowerman), his partner Alistair (Robin
Herford), and their respective wives, June and Emma (Carole Boyd and Lavinia
Bertram).
June, according to her husband, is clearly anticipating a wonderful time,
never having been so hard done-to. Fractious and bitchy, she possesses the
sort of outlook that labels the boat a floating rabbit hutch on an open
sewer and her husband an arrogant little sex-starved ferret.
Keith, his pomposity undeflated, elects himself skipper and proceeds to
issue orders in nautical terms foreign to his wishy-washy partner, Alistair,
and Emma, his faithful if slightly frustrated wife.
But personalities will out. "Boats are a society in miniature," says Keith.
"Everybody has a role, everybody has a function."
Unfortunately for him his is not the role of skipper.
On the scene just in time to save the crew from shipwreck arrives Vince
(Graeme Eton), tall and tanned, not young but reasonably lovely, one earring
glistening and a medallion clanking heavily against hairy chest.
June is fascinated; Keith infuriated. When business calls him away (being
just as indispensable at work as he is aboard) the door is open for Vince to
move in - and he does.
The ex-commando, aided and abetted by the wild, bird-watching daughter of an
earl who uses the last of her five Christian names and forgets her title
(Gillian Bevan) becomes skipper, lover, thug, and pirate.
And all the time June becomes more treacherous, Keith more self-important,
Alistair more insipid and Emma more frustrated. Evil looks set to triumph as
the party nears Armageddon Bridge - the scene of the final conflict between
the forces.
There are whole chunks of this production that are difficult to fault.
Edward Lipscomb's ingenious and hyper-original set is a stunner.
Francis Lynch's lighting is fabulous and the sound-effects almost a feature
in their own right. The acting, as usual, makes the best of the Ayckbourn
wit and pathos, combined in his own strange way.
But "Way Upstream" goes a bit off-bean. The allusions are a bit
lofty; the fantasy of it all a bit heavy. The set, good as it was, removed
any scope for the ingenuity usually apparent in an Ayckbourn production. It
hogged the play, putting more demands on the action and the dialogue.
The hilarity of the first half dissipated in the second, the story unfolding
like a grim fairy tale, reality becoming fantasy, and the hero only shedding
his coward's skin almost by default.
As for the nude finale - delightful though it is to imagine the shock of it
making genteel bottom jaws drop so hard that the lower teeth nearly meet the
larynx, it seemed like nudity for the sake of it.
Perhaps Ayckbourn expects too much of his audience. Having howled through
part of the play, it is not easy to concentrate on getting the message in
the rest.
Way Upstream is directed by Ayckbourn himself."
(Scarborough Evening News, 3 August 1981)
Way Upstream (by Robin Thornber)
"Surprises teem in Alan Ayckbourn's 26th play, from the moment you walk
into the auditorium of Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre to find the tiny
arena stage flooded and a full-scale cabin cruiser moored to one side.
Ayckbourn has always enjoyed toying with the technical limits of the stage
and its visual possibilities, teasing out the new stimuli and challenges to
the audience's imagination. Each time you wonder what he'll do next. And
it's always a surprise.
This time the technical novelty seems to have taken over - there's a danger
of the boat stealing the show. It works superbly, chugging into midstream
and gloaming over as it passes under the chill of an echoing bridge.
Designed by Edward Lipscomb and lit by Francis Lynch, the boat earns a round
of applause for the stage crew.
But the boat is only the first in a series of surprises in this strange
saga. If it's visually a commercial for the Inland Waterways Association,
philosophically it's a plug for the soggy centrism of the Social Democratic
Party. It's the first time Ayckbourn has been so politically explicit.
The boat is the setting for a holiday cruise up the River Orb for two
couples, one bossy and assertive, the other sensitive and put-upon. They're
partners in a firm that makes fancy goods, and while the bosses are away,
their workers take over the factory. Meeting his secretary for, daily
up-dating, Keith (Robin Bowerman) is for taking them on his wife June
(Carole Boyd) just resents the intrusion.
But then the play makes another new departure for Ayckbourn, from cosily
familiar naturalism into an almost mystical world of fantasy. Normally all
his characters are pathetically flawed. Here for the first time, we meet
real, hard evil. Drifting bully Vince (Graeme Eton) and his titled playgirl
friend Fleur (Gillian Bevan) move in and take over the boat.
Nice, reasonable, and ineffectual, like you and me, Alistair (Robin Herford)
and Emma (Lavinia Bertram) are the only credible characters in the play.
Faced with unreason - aggressive greed on the one hand and violent anarchy
on the other - they are forced to assert themselves, and finally emerge
alone into the sunlit haven beyond Armageddon Bridge, where they strip off
to jump hand-in-hand into the water - the tasteful nudity being another
first for Ayckbourn.
One other difference. Usually when Ayckbourn directs his own plays the
build-up of historical farce carries you over any minor faults in the
writing or production. Without it, every lull and misplaced intonation is
irritatingly laid bare."
(The Guardian, 5 October 1981)
Way Upstream (by David Jeffels)
"Prolific playwright Alan Ayckbourn has produced the biggest shock of
his 26-hit play career by introducing full frontal nudity into his latest
play at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough.
But produced as it is in the closing moments of Way Upstream with
Robin Herford and Lavinia Bertram poised artistically on the edge of a boat
as they simulate a dive into the river, it provides the ideal ending to a
story of traumas between married couples, business partners and friends.
Ayckbourn has again turned to his familiar and successful recipe, but Way
Upstream tended to wane after its initial impact. The pace slackened
and the characters became a little monotonous. However, it has some superbly
funny lines and great turns of phrase in typical Ayckbourn style.
The entire play is set on a holiday river boat with two couples not exactly
compatible either individually or collectively. Robin Bowerman is brilliant
as the self-appointed skipper who succeeds in irritating his crew to the
point of mutiny. Robin Herford as the weak submissive partner both in
marriage and business is most impressive.
Carole Boyd had some superb lines which she used to the full, while Lavinia
Bertram gave a very convincing performance as a wife beleaguered by a
husband lacking authority and drive.
Susan Uebel was delightful as the company secretary who turned up at every
other lock to report on crises at the factory, while Graeme Eton worked hard
- probably too hard - as the suave experienced boating expert who joins the
crew. He hit every line - to the detriment of the dialogue, as something
should have been retained for the tenser moments.
Gillian Bevan is his sophisticated partner in crime, and she was well cast
in this production, directed by Ayckbourn and brilliantly designed by Edward
Lipscomb.
Like almost all his other plays, Way Upstream is certainly destined
for the West End, but should receive some tightening up and adjustments if
it is to be as successful as his previous works."
(The Stage, 15 October 1981) |
