26. ARRIVALS
AND DEPARTURES
Anyone going to an Alan Ayckbourn
play can be forgiven for thinking they’re about to spend a couple of hours
laughing at the foibles, usually marital, of the British middle class; they’ll also usually find some
subtextual underpinning providing a touch of pathos that gives the comic
elements a richer human texture. The 75-year-old Ayckbourn, of course, is the
master par excellence of this kind of commercial comedy-drama, with even more plays
to his credit (78) than he has years. With ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES, his often
delightful and thoughtful play—being given a marvelous performance at 59E59 as
part of a repertory of three plays titled Ayckbourn Ensemble (the others are
TIME OF MY LIFE and FARCICALS) during the Brits Off Broadway Festival—the tone
is different from what you might have expected. In the two and a half
hour play (with one intermission), which
originated at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England, Mr.
Ayckbourn’s base of operations, there are many laughs spread throughout, but the
play’s conclusion may take you by surprise.
Bill Champion, Elizabeth Boag. Photo: Andrew Higgins.
At first we seem to be watching
the playwright satirize the ineptness of a British security operation set up to
capture a terrorist codenamed Cerastes (after a venemous viper of that name) at
a London train station. The operation is under the command of Quentin (Bill
Champion), an egregiously officious officer, dressed as a chauffeur, with a
whistle around his neck that he uses to train his seemingly incompetent band of
undercover agents. These belong to the Strategic Simulated Distractional Operations Unit (SSDO),
an obvious swipe at the pompous names such operations often employ. The unit is
rehearsing in plainclothes disguise to make its members seem to be simply a man
and his wife with a baby in a stroller, a romantic young couple, a foreigner
with a map seeking directions, and the like. Each is so awful in their little
sketch—the Norwegian accent the foreigner uses might as well be from Botswana—that
Quentin insists on repeating them over and over, even as the clock
ticks down to the suspect’s expected arrival, with Quentin
demanding he be taken alive. The clumsy exaggerations of the plainclothes
characters are broad enough to border on farce, but they’re not quite funny
enough to inspire continuous laughter.
Bill Champion, Kim Wall. Photo: Andrew Higgins.
They are, indeed, not the main
purpose of the play, which focuses on a 23-year-old female soldier, Ez Swain (Elizabeth
Boag), short for Esme, a troubled woman whose career is in decline,
and Barry Hawkins (Kim Wall), a shlubby, white-haired, middle-aged traffic warden
from Yorkshire, who has been helicoptered in to help identify the terrorist,
since he recently encountered him in a parking ticket incident. Ez is there as
Barry’s minder, her mission to protect him from danger. For much of the time,
Ez and Barry are alone on stage, waiting for the operation to commence, as
Quentin periodically enters to check on them and give instructions, including
ordering them to create their own characters so as to blend in and be
inconspicuous. Ez is distant, stiff, cold, and bitter. Barry, endowed with a
rich Yorkshire accent, is the opposite, being loquacious, cheery, eternally
active, and aggressively good natured no matter how often he’s rebuffed. Quentin’s
telling Ez and Barry to “merge” fires Barry’s imagination and he attempts to
find some common ground with Ez, but her own preoccupations keep her in a
bubble of alienation from both Barry and everything else.
As they wait, the lights fade
intermittently on Barry while moments from Ez’s life spring into her
consciousness and are enacted, until we come to some realization of the painful circumstances
that have made this emotionally stifled woman who she is. Act one ends when
the terrorist shows up and the SSDO moves into action, seemingly bringing the
play to a conclusion. This being an Ayckbourn play, however, we should expect
some interesting dramaturgical twist when act two proceeds. And, whether we
like it or not, we aren’t disappointed when we soon realize that much of act
one is being repeated precisely, except that the staging (Ayckbourn himself
directed) is being done in a mirror image of how it happened in act one; now, when the lights dim they do so on Ez, while Barry’s memories come
into play, showing the backstory revealing who he is and what travails his life has
brought him. Seeing these scenes, against the backdrop of what we now know
about Esme, enriches the drama greatly. Again, the terrorist operation
concludes the play, but Ayckbourn, who by now has altered the play’s comic mood
considerably as we’ve engaged with the heartache in Esme and Barry’s lives,
takes us a step further into the darkness before the lights go out for good.
Ayckbourn says in his program
note that the idea for the play came from his experience waiting in transportation
hubs for a train, plane, or bus, when brief moments from his life would flash
by when least expected. He writes that ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES is “a series of
those mental snapshots, each lasting in reality probably only a second, coming
and going in the subliminal blink of an eye, now you see them, now you don’t,
sometimes gone forever. For the sake of the play . . . I have, as with Japanese
dried flowers, unpacked them slightly, given them water and allowed them to
unfurl a little.” In the play, the memories of two total strangers, momentarily
brought together, are presented, with no interaction between them other than
what the circumstances create as the basis for new memories that one of them
will live with forever after. There’s a definite poignancy to the ways lives
intersect and become entwined with others while so much about each remains
hidden beneath the surface, never to emerge.
As with so many Ayckbourn plays,
the mechanics of the dramaturgy sometimes take precedence over the reality of
the events depicted, but ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES nevertheless manages to grip
you with its depiction of these two lost souls caught up in the vortex of a
shared experience but never able to know each other, just as most of us in life
never truly know anyone else, even those closest to us. In addition to the
play’s shift in dramatic tone, it also might be argued that having both Esme
and Barry have such raw backstories, involving sexual and financial betrayal, among
other things, might be considered too melodramatic, or that by concluding the
play as he does, Ayckbourn is trying to affect us emotionally in a way not
organic to his characters’ development. This does, however, offer an
opportunity for a touching fantasy sequence at the very end, when two child
actresses, playing the young Ez (Gracey Brouillard or Genevieve Beirne,
depending on the performance) and Barry’s young daughter, Daisy (Vivianne
Brouillard or Phoebe Beirne), briefly merge before parting, but I'll say no more because this is spoiler territory.
Jan Bee Brown’s unobtrusive,
clearly low-cost set design is a simple, essentially impersonal arrangement of
three steel benches on a black floor with geometric patterns, surrounded by
black curtains. Her costumes are spot-on, yet funny, in capturing both the clownish participants in
the terrorist operation and the eccentric characters, ranging over different periods, in
Ez and Barry’s memories. Making the play even more appealing is Ayckbourn’s
impressive direction, both in its pacing, blocking (except, perhaps, for some moments toward the end), and the way each member of
the cast brings great clarity to their characterizations. Aside from the actors
playing Quentin, Barry, Ez, and the children, the rest of the company all play
multiple roles; as with most well-trained British ensembles, even the smallest
roles are carefully crafted and distinctively characterized.
Mr. Champion’s Quentin
is a perfect example of British self-importance and pigheadedness, while Ms. Boag’s
Ez and Mr. Wall’s Barry are exemplary portrayals that are among the finest of
the young season thus far. Ms. Boag makes Ez defensive, hostile yet civil, and
achingly vulnerable within a shell of military self-confidence. Mr. Wall’s
performance is more flamboyant, being a bundle of nervous tics, shaking knees,
facial grimaces, mumblings to himself, and cheerful smiles. All of it masks the demons
eating at him as a good man who has let life step all over him yet who
struggles to keep himself (and others) positive, finding the best in others,
even when they don’t deserve it.
Note: Theatre A at 59E59 provides
assisted listening devices to those who need them.