A Diptych of Comedy and Carnival: Alan Ayckbourn’s House & Garden

Abstract

This article examines Alan Ayckbourn’s two linked plays, House & Garden, in the context of an entire career exploring the limits and boundaries of theatrical conventions. As the driving force and artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, a complex which houses two theatres – a proscenium stage and a theatre-in-the-round – the playwright/director has a flexible, state-of-the-art laboratory in which to experiment with theatrical elements which have always fascinated him. In House & Garden, Ayckbourn stretches stage boundaries in unprecedented ways by writing two plays to be performed simultaneously in two adjacent auditoria – a comedy of manners for the proscenium and a carnivalesque farce for the round. Stephanie Tucker analyzes how this unprecedented dramatic diptych exploits the possibilities of theatrical space, on and offstage, whilst appropriating elements from traditions as various as Greek satyr plays and nineteenth-century drama, and from venues as disparate as the carnival square and the drawing room. This experiment, she argues, forces audiences to re-examine preconceived notions concerning theatre’s relationship to the ‘real’ world, a theme which runs through Ayckbourn’s opus. Stephanie Tucker, who teaches at California State University, Sacramento, has published articles on various aspects of contemporary British and American theatre and is presently engaged upon a book-length study of Ayckbourn’s drama and stagecraft.