NIKOLAI Foster found his first experience of directing an Alan Ayckbourn play “quite difficult” when staging Season’s Greetings at the Liverpool Playhouse five years ago in only his second professional engagement.
Nevertheless, he has welcomed the chance to be at the helm of Harrogate Theatre and the Oldham Coliseum Theatre’s co-production of Absent Friends, his first Ayckbourn show since then.
“Audiences and theatre practitioners perceive Ayckbourn’s work to be cosy, but he is much more complex than that, writing about the darker depths of the middle classes, so I wanted to study him again,” says the Skipton-born director, whose past shows include Animal Farm and Bollywood Jane at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.
Absent Friends was a landmark play in Ayckbourn’s career, its tragicomic story of past and present colliding at a tea party from hell being written by the Scarborough playwright in 1974 in transition from “the sunnier plays of my youth to the so-called darker ones that follow”.
Ayckbourn conceived it as a risk-taking play in which “nothing happened”. “In terms of plot, nothing happens, but psychologically everything happens,” argues Nikolai.
“It’s not necessarily a play about death and the loss of life, but it is ultimately about the loss of love, and though there are moments where you feel he’s moving back to more familiar Ayckbourn territory – when it seems he’s stepping outside his remit – he does show the tragedy of life sitting very closely alongside the comic. You can’t have one without the other.”
Just as a Noel Coward house style persists, so Ayckbourn productions can be burdened with stereotypical acting, a fault that Nikolai has been determined to banish. “Directors are often frightened of presenting his characters in the dark light in which he wrote them, and so over 30 years, a style of playing Ayckbourn has developed, and though it’s not my job to knock back preconceptions, it has never been a better time to re-assess him,” says Nikolai.
This is not to suggest that he is playing a forceful hand. “I feel very strongly that my job is to serve the play and the playwright and not to conceptualise it, and my casting was based on finding actors intent on conveying the truth,” says Nikolai, whose company includes erstwhile soap stars Stephen Pinder (Brookside’s Max Farnham) and Samantha Giles (Emmerdale’s Bernice) and Kerry Peers (The Bill’s Suzi Croft).
His production is not slavishly tied to the 1970s. “It could be tempting to set it in a garish pastiche of the Seventies but in fact you come to it with as much integrity as possible,” he says.
“It’s a play with universal truths where audiences may expect a cosy night but there’s a call to arms about many things that are relevant to today – the death of love is a very interesting concept as we’ve all experienced love and lost it.”
Five years on from Season Greetings, Nikolai returns to Ayckbourn’s work feeling he is only now beginning to understand fully what it is to be a director. “The most important thing is to back your instincts, trusting them to the full in applying them to the text,” he says. “That’s when you see your vision come to life and pay off.”
Absent Friends runs at Harrogate Theatre from February 25th until March 13, 7.30pm plus Saturday 2.30pm matinees.
Box office: 01423 502116 or www.harrogatetheatre.co.uk
