Another British playwright that American actors may not get to chance to perform, so why is it here? Because knowing details about one of his comedies will help Americans understand other British comedies. And the meanings behind its lines are similar to those behind the lines in the tv series SUITS, BREAKING BAD, and FRIENDS !
Ayckbourn has had forty of his plays produced on Broadway, and thirty in London’s West End, but they often don’t run for more than a month in America because – when performed by American actors – the lines are not fully understood!
His plays are mostly comedies about married couples, and this is a monologue is from his play INTIMATE EXCHANGES . This is a speech which actors could use to do their monologue-coaching on their own!
Audiences, and actors can get into a good mood before a performance of his plays even begins, because they often include a mad idea which audience knows about before it even starts. The ‘idea’ in this play is that it has four male and four female characters, and never more than one man and one woman are on stage at the same time. This makes it possible for one actor to play all the men and another to play all the women – with lots of costume-changes ! So two actors can play all eight parts, and feel in a good mood before they even walk on the stage!
The following lines, which could be done as a monologue, has a senior, or middle-aged man complaining about his life. And if his complaints are all said in the same angry one of voice they will be boring, and not very funny! But there is a British ‘attitude’ behind every complaint which makes each line more ridiculous than the previous one . And these attitudes make it easy to understand the comedy of other British (and some American) plays.
TOBY is the headmaster of a small ‘private’ school, – which in the UK means for children with rich parents, – unlike most schools in the UK which are free. The opinions he expresses are all crazy, and could lose him his job if he said them in public, but he is sat in his garden, with a beer in his hand, and with his wife who has just asked him: “Why do you drink so much!” He answers – (and please remember when reading it the first time, that – without knowing the ‘attitude’ behind every line it sounds a very dull speech to use for monologue coaching!
TOBY: You really want to know? Number one: I think the whole
of life has become one long losing battle, all right? That’s the first
reason I’m drinking. Number two: I find myself hemmed in by
an increasing number of quite appalling people all flying under
the flags of various breeds of socialism, all of whom so far as I
can gather are hell-bent on courses of self-reward and self-
remuneration that make the biggest capitalist look like Trotsky’s
Aunt Mildred. Number three: on the other hand we have the rest
of the country who don’t even have the decency to pretend that
they’re doing it for the benefit of their fellow men. Ha, ha. They’re
just grabbing hand over fist the most they can get for the minimum
of effort by whatever grubby underhand means they can muster.
Number four: We have half the men going round looking like women
and half the women looking like men and the rest of us in the middle
not knowing what the bloody hell we are. Number five: And the few
remaining women who don’t look like men are busy ripping their
clothes off and prancing around on video cassettes and soft porn
discs trying to persuade us that sex can be fun. Fun for God’s sake.
So can World War Three. Number six: -are you still with me? – We
now have a police force that according to my paper anyway, is more
dishonest than the people we’re paying them to arrest. Number seven:
They’ve started this filthy floodlit cricket with cricketers wearing tin
hats and advertisements for contraceptives on their boots.
This can seem like a list of complaints, and they can all sounds the same ! But it is TOBY’s attitude to each of them which gives each line its life.
TOBY thinks he must be intelligent because he has become a headmaster, and because no-one has sacked him. But nobody else wants the job in his awful school, and it would be very embarrassing’ for the school governors to sack him ! So he may be there for another twenty years !
His reply to his wife – about why he drinks – begins with his own question: “You really want to know?” He does not pause for a reply. He regards his wife as another of his students, and expects her to listen! And she stays with him because she is too scared to live on her own now, and when he shoots out his next word – “ONE!” – it is clear that he has more than ‘one’ answer ready.
Americans can also complain about modern life, of course, but not in this ‘British’ way. Toby first describes his life as a ‘battle’, as if he has been at war for hundreds of years – which the UK has often been of course, – and TOBY speaks as if he was a General in all of those wars, and gives his wife no time to escape before spitting out the word “TWO!”
The UK has gave women many ‘rights’ before the rest of the world, but TOBY feels it has happened too fast! He regards his wife and the local villagers as if he were a prison-governor looking down on his prisoners. So he is angry that they want him to work at the stupid school which he doesn’t want to anyway! And he fires off his next complaint – that socialists are all Russian spies (or “Trotsky aunt”) – so fast that he cannot possibly be contradicted. He feels he is a celebrity in his small village, and might even look round for an audience when he launches into his next ‘insight’ – dismissing the entire world of LGBT as if they were all tiny children.
What makes this amusing is that he seems to have held his views for 500 years, which is only possible with a British accent. But his attitudes will make any accent sound genuine, because he is happy to trash politicians, proud to lombast the police, thrilled to chastise all modern sportsmen, and to ‘dis’ the entire modern world as a waste of time! And his wonderful wife listens to him. None of this happens anywhere else but the in UK.
The UK has already had its kind of American dream, for it once ruled half of the world. And Toby has found a solution that deals with the problems which he feels he has inherited from the UK’s last thousand years, and the solution is alcohol. In America he might go to a shrink, and calm down, but in the UK he is respected by the parents of the children he teaches, (because of his ‘title’ of Headmaster,) feared by all the children, and ‘accepted’ by his wife. But, as the play will show, she may not stand by her man much longer !
