I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to have one of my plays, Table Manners, read out in front of an audience at the Player Playwrights group. I had no idea what to expect, but one thing I hadn’t expected was to be collared straight off by an audience member and told, ‘You do realise that Table Manners is the name of a play by Alan Ayckbourn?’
‘Er, no …’ I said.
‘It’s really famous,’ she said.
This was particularly embarrassing as I had seen quite a lot of Ayckbourn’s work, and had often thought of my play as Ayckbourn-esque. I’d envisaged it as a kind of middle-class equivalent of the kitchen-sink drama – a kitchen-table drama, if you will – with the action taking place around said piece of furniture. I’d thought the title was perfect and was dismayed to find that Ayckbourn had already nicked it.
So my play (title to be decided) was read out. It was excruciating at times to hear lines that had only existed in my head suddenly spoken out loud. The actors did a magnificent job wrestling with my often garbled syntax and ill-begotten metaphors. About halfway through Act I, I thought, Christ, this is dragging a bit. I kept my head down, for fear that I would see the audience nodding off. Things did improve somewhat. People laughed, and sometimes in the right places.
The custom at Player Playwrights is for the author to sit in front of the audience after the reading and be subjected to comments and suggestions and questions. Everybody was kind and generous, and only a few mentioned Alan Ayckbourn. Everybody then gave the play a mark out of 10 in categories such as Premise, Structure, Characters and Dialogue. My final average score came to 63.4%, which I thought was pretty good. Maybe a C grade in a particular generous exam year. I’ll take that.
Subsequently, the play has been longlisted for the Bread and Roses Theatre Playwriting Award, so clearly it must have something. It does need quite a lot of rewriting, though, especially in that draggy first act.
And, of course, it needs a new title. From now on, whenever I write a play, I will be checking it against the Ayckbourn oeuvre. He and I are clearly on the same wavelength.
Ian Critchley 