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~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 19th 2011

Alan Ayckbourn's 75th play, "Neighbourhood Watch", which runs Off Broadway till January 1st, is directed by Ayckbourn himself. Plenty of playwrights make a hash of directing their own work, but on BBC Radio 4 yesterday Ayckbourn passed on some tips about his successful lesser-known career as a director.

Quite a lot of decent directing is counterpoint. So you've got something happening, which is the speech end, but something else physically happening, which counterpoints it. I use the plumber-in-the-cupboard analogy. The wife lets in the plumber in the morning. He goes into the pantry and shuts the door, and he's busy working on some pipes in there and she conveniently forgets about him. The husband comes in and she and the husband then have one of those awful rows that only married couples can have.

As Ayckbourn describes the row, the couple almost destroy one another. If you read the dialogue on the page, he points out, it's a hair-raising experience, but when you see it on stage, you see the plumber in the pantry not knowing whether or not to come out before the argument gets any worse. Ayckbourn says, 

The audience is then balanced on two sides. Half of them are laughing at the plumber. And the other half are gasping at the row that's going on.    read more »

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