Alan Ayckbourn: Early Plays
Prior to his first professional commission, Alan Ayckbourn recalls he wrote approximately a dozen one act plays between his first professional acting job in 1956, aged 17, and the premiere of The Square Cat in 1959. Very little is known about any of these plays and only a handful of them are still in existence.The Honeymoon
Until 2022, next to nothing was known about The Honeymoon, a play written by Alan following his marriage to Christine Roland in 1959. Alan has never spoken publicly about the play and the only written reference to it is a quote from Christine in Paul Allen’s Ayckbourn biography, Grinning At The Edge.“We enjoyed a happy and snowy Christmas [1958] including an out-of-work actor who arrived on the doorstep with no money and nowhere to stay and who later appeared as ‘HB’ in The Honeymoon, a play Alan wrote shortly after our marriage the following year.”
The play was believed to have been lost but, during 2022, Christine donated a photocopy of the play to the Ayckbourn Archive. Unfortunately, the original manuscript was so fragile it was destroyed whilst being copied and only one original manuscript page now survives alongside the photocopy of the play.
Christine recalls co-writing the play with Alan - as she did with his first professionally produced play The Square Cat. Her recollection that it was written prior to The Square Cat though seems unlikely as they were married in May 1959 by which point The Square Cat had been scheduled into Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre’s summer season.
When Allen made further enquiries to Alan about the play for the biography, the playwright believed it got no further than a reading but could remember nothing more other than it was definitely never performed.
The Millennium scripts are held in the Ayckbourn Archive at the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York.
A New Discovery
This article by Simon Murgatroyd was first published on the Ayckbourn Blog on 4 April 2024.I’ve also notably been looking at a new Ayckbourn play - or rather a very old one which no-one has had access to for more than six decades. It’s called The Honeymoon and previously the only reference to it was in Paul Allen’s biography of Alan, Grinning at The Edge.
“He [Alan] rented a tiny flat and we [Alan and his fiancée Christine Roland] enjoyed a happy and snowy Christmas, including an out-of-work actor who arrived on the doorstep with no money and nowhere to stay and who later appeared as ‘HB’ in The Honeymoon, a play Alan wrote shortly after our marriage the following year.”
Allen notes the play “seems to have sunk without trace and Alan thinks it may never have got more than a reading anyway.” That’s the best case scenario. There’s no other mention of the play in archive and no manuscript was believed to exist - judging from the biography, Allen himself hadn’t seen it and only heard about it from Alan’s first wife, Christine Roland.
It’s always been assumed to be in the same category as the plays which Alan has mentioned he wrote prior to his first professional commission, which certainly existed but have long since been lost or destroyed.
Except, The Honeymoon wasn’t destroyed. Or at least it wasn’t until 2023. At which point, a photocopy of the manuscript of The Honeymoon was sent to Alan. Unfortunately, it appears that in the process of copying it, all but the original cast page was destroyed. Fortunately, the photocopy survives and has been verified as authentic.
So what is the play’s significance? Let’s look at the timeline first. Alan is commissioned to write his first play by Stephen Joseph in December 1958, which Alan then writes during the Studio Theatre Ltd winter tour over a two week period at some point between January and March 1959. He marries Christine on 9 May and The Square Cat is first performed on 30 July at Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre.
If Alan wrote The Honeymoon shortly after his marriage, then it’s likely to have been written between mid-May and the beginning of June. The summer season at Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre commenced on 17 June with a production of John van Druten’s Bell, Book and Candle with Alan playing the role of Nicholas Holroyd. Rehearsals would have begun on 9 June. Realistically, The Honeymoon could have been finished no later than 6 June.
What else can we say? Well, it’s definitely his first full-length work written subsequent to The Square Cat, but it was never performed. Alan did write a couple of little known plays in this period which went on to be performed by amateur companies in Scarborough, but this isn’t one of them. His second professionally produced play, Love After All, was written between mid-September and – probably – mid-November before premiering at the Library Theatre on 21 December 1959.
Plausibly The Honeymoon might have had a reading by the company during the summer season, but, interestingly, it’s an eight hander and both the summer and winter seasons had only five professional actors. So it patently wasn’t going to be performed professionally that year – it’s just too large a cast and, even with possible doubling, it still can’t be performed with less than six actors, far larger than Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre was generally employing during this period.
It feels, judging by other plays of the period written by Alan, that it was written with the amateur companies in mind. Between 1958 and 1962, we know that Alan wrote at least five plays for amateur performance and at least one, The Party Game, had an extended cast (10 in this case) which would have rendered it unsuitable for professional performance. Like The Honeymoon, this was also never performed.
The Honeymoon is also notably not as good a play as The Square Cat. Now The Square Cat has issues - understandably – it’s Alan’s first professional commissioned play and he admits it has more than a few rough edges. But structurally The Square Cat hangs together well, it’s a fun farce with all five characters introduced by the end of act 1 and all having a relatively satisfying arc.
The Honeymoon reads like a play with a great concept, but no clear idea of how it will resolve. An unwelcome, penniless friend arrives at a tiny flat on a honeymoon night and ingratiates himself into the flat that same day. But as the situation escalates, characters become more thinly sketched - occasionally disappearing altogether - as the play concentrates on trying to resolve the absurd situation. It feels as though it’s aiming for farce, but fails to hit the notes as successfully as The Square Cat.
The first act is the most successful as the unwelcome aspiring author HB - looking like a role written by the playwright for himself - manipulates his way into the flat and brings his girlfriend, Myrtle along, despite the objections of the couple, David and Jill, and the fact this will spoil their honeymoon night. By the second act - a month later - we are introduced to another random would-be lodger, Simon, and Jill’s sister Ginnette. with all six characters now sharing the flat on the wedding day of HB and Myrtle. Structurally, the mirroring of the situation from the first act would probably have served the play better had it ended there.
However, Act 3 - set the next morning - sees Ginnette rather implausibly looking to bag Simon as a partner - having known him for less than 24 hours - and then vanishing away. Only for Jill and Ginnette’s father to turn up, hastily pursued by their mother, who is determined to bring Ginnette back home. Whilst an enjoyable if slightly contrived “bourgeois old battle-axe” of a character, this leads to Myrtle and the mother having a face-off and the mother being seen off to the delight of all.
The play ends with HB and Myrtle promising to leave for another friend’s flat and the father suddenly knocking on the door to say he’s been kicked out and can he have a place to stay? Of Ginnette and Simon, there is no sight after they left for lunch at the beginning of the act, only that they too are going to stay in the flat and, presumably, also get married rather quickly.
What doesn’t work is the fact there’s a very contrived happy ending with HB and Myrtle seen as friends and saviours of David and Jill - despite the fact that Jill has spent the entire play infuriated by the couple. On top of this, Jill is reduced to a rather simpering character whose backbone of the first two acts vanishes as she settles for a ‘happy ending’ with David, a spineless character who has previously tried to pin the blame of his failings and problems largely on Jill.
It’s a pretty unsatisfactory ending and whilst The Square Cat may have a rather implausible finale, the fact it’s a farce and leans into the double-identity aspect of the play does mean it’s more successful.
The Honeymoon does have its odd moments and there are a few good lines. At one point, when Ginnette is chatting up Simon, she delivers the line “All men must need a woman to confide in and to talk to about themselves”, which is pretty sharp for a 20 year old male writer. There’s also the reason David and Jill are spending their first night in a flat rather than on a honeymoon holiday because, as Jill points out, “I couldn’t bear to think that we’d wasted all that money when we might quarrel all the time.” It doesn’t paint a particularly optimistic picture of this relationship’s future!
So what now? Well, the photocopy of the manuscript will go into the Ayckbourn Archive at the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York, but it won’t be published nor will permission ever be given for it to be performed.
In the meantime, it’s a rare insight into the very early work of Alan Ayckbourn and his progress as a writer. It’s interesting to look at a play that doesn’t work, but helps shows just how quickly he was learning his craft. We always have to remember that Alan goes from his first professionally performed work to the extraordinarily polished Relatively Speaking in less than six years.
And at a time when it’s getting less and less likely we’re going to discover any more previously thought lost scripts - the last one prior to The Honeymoon was Love Undertaken, which was brought to light in 2008 - it’s always exciting to be able to look at something essentially unseen for six decades and get a little more insight into the playwright and his development.
Simon Murgatroyd, 2024
Copyright of Simon Murgatroyd 2024. Please do not reproduce without permission of the copyright holder.
All research for this page is by Simon Murgatroyd and should not be reproduced without permission.