The Valuable Library of the Hon. Samuel W. Pennypacker, Embracing His Important Collection o... Book

I borrowed three Alan Ayckbourn plays from the library and this is the third I’ve read in a week. I think I’ve now had enough Alan Ayckbourn, he hasn’t won me over. Ayckbourn’s reputation is intriguing: writing popular comedies, he also gained critical kudos. I’m not only finding it difficult to know why he gains the praise, but also why he’s so popular. I presume A Small Family Business works much better on the stage than it does when read off the page. I don’t find it particularly funny, but maybe it’s a different experience in the theatre. The back cover of my edition tells me it won an award in 1987 for being the best new play of the year and two of the quoted reviewers extol it as a “morality play”, one of them proclaiming Ayckbourn as a fine “recorder of social nuance.” Well, I don’t get it. A Small Family Business reminds me of the Boulting Brothers’ satiric films made in the late 1950s, things like I’m All Right Jack. These were much respected at the time, but I find the famous satire to be little more than Tory sneering at the modern world. It aims to make us feel superior, not questioning. Is that the basis of Ayckbourn? A Small Family Business is centred on Jack who is about to take over the family business – or, to be more exact, his father-in-law’s business. The play begins with a family party celebrating the event, but proceedings are interrupted by a detective who is after Jack’s teenage daughter for shoplifting. And then he finds the problem with the business is that everyone is on the take...his brother and his wife, his brother-in-law, his son-in-law, all bleeding the family business dry. That, I suppose, is why it is a “morality play”, but it is all fairly comfortable, the modern world is one where people only care about themselves and have no concern for the consequences...but we are not like that. Jack is the most interesting character, trying to do right while keeping loyal to his family. And “social nuance”? The characters seem little more than types – I’ve got nothing against genre fictions where characters begin as types but then gain more resonance, either through a growing complexity of detail or complexity of context (e.g., the best Hollywood films or Charles Dickens' novels), but I can’t find that in Ayckbourn: I can’t see anything other than easy and glib types, which makes it all very comfortable – we can relax in the way we relax when watching a sitcom. But there is also a bit of “social comment” so we can feel it is doing us good. (But I temper my dismissal knowing, as always with a play, that it might just work differently when being enacted.)