| Subject: Re: Ayckbourn's Absent Friends |
Author:
Theresa H
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Date Posted: Friday, October 10, 08:01:54am
In reply to:
Leila
's message, "Ayckbourn's Absent Friends" on Wednesday, October 08, 07:25:58pm
Thanks very much for this Leila. I found it very interesting and was also quite moved by Abigail talking about her father.
Cheers
Theresa H
>I've just found the following about Abigail Thaw,
>
>
>Abigail Thaw talks '70s feminism in light of
>Ayckbourn's Absent Friends
>10:14am Friday 26th September 2008
>By Melanie Dakin »
>
>
>In 1974, when Alan Ayckbourn wrote Absent Friends,
>Abigail Thaw’s father, John Thaw, best known as TV’s
>Inspector Morse, was just about to make the pilot for
>his other key role as tough talking detective Jack
>Regan in The Sweeney. Four years previously her mum,
>Sally Alexander, had found fame of another kind by
>flour-bombing the Miss World Contest at the Albert
>Hall. By that time, the couple had divorced and
>Abigail, who plays Diana in Watford Palace’s
>production of the play next week, was living with her
>mother in Pimlico. While women’s liberation and
>divorce were possible in real life, they were clearly
>unthinkable among Ayckbourn’s characters.
>Inspired by a real life event, Absent Friends centres
>on a tea party organised by Diana to cheer up Colin, a
>friend of her husband Paul, whose fiancée has just
>died.
>Ayckbourn writes about the human condition so
>beautifully
>Abigail Thaw
>Plans go awry as no one knows what to say to Colin and
>John turns up with his wife Evelyn, who has been
>having an affair with Paul. Through it all, Colin
>remains perfectly happy while the others examine their
>less than perfect relationships.
>Abigail sees the couples as being trapped by factors
>that do not affect us today.
>She says: “There are two generations of women in the
>play, Evelyn is slightly younger and though she may be
>sexually liberated, she’s equally unhappy. She’s in a
>thankless marriage and is using sex to fill a gaping
>emptiness in her life.
>“Looking at the older women, you can see why there was
>a feminist movement. They have all this intelligence
>and nowhere to direct it. That wasn’t true in my own
>case, as my mother divorced her husband, but most
>women weren’t educated to believe they had choices.”
>Although Abigail sees Diana’s world as very different
>from her own, she can identify with her problems.
>“In rehearsals, we've been referencing these old
>magazines like Cosmopolitan and the articles are
>mainly about how to have as many lovers as you want
>and adopting a throw your car keys in the bowl, not
>caring, attitude. It’s the rise of the sexually
>liberated woman after years of being held down.
>“But, alongside all these overt articles egging women
>on about sexual freedom, there’s this advert for a
>savings account which says ‘Make him save properly’
>and this was totally disempowering.
>“Where’s the real power if you can’t take the bus into
>town, buy your own car or open your own bank account
>because you don’t have your own money?”
>Many of these issues bubble under the surface in the
>play. Marriage in particular is seen as more of an
>institution.
>“They were from an older generation and they just put
>up with it. They made it work in a way we don’t have
>to.”
>Abigail and her partner Nigel Whitmey have two
>children, Molly Mae and Talia. They’re not married but
>have been together for more than 20 years. Abigail
>points out that although fewer people are getting
>married now, statistics show divorce rates are also in
>decline.
>“Perhaps people are thinking more deeply about it
>now,” she says. “The 1970s was the advent of feminism
>but people just didn’t talk about things the way we do
>now. Women were under a stigma that said you don’t
>talk about sex or death.”
>Death is ever present in the play and in 2002
>Abigail’s father, died of throat cancer.
>I ask her if it was more difficult to come to terms
>with what had happened while under the gaze of so many
>others.
>“I was working at the time and I always thought the
>process was delayed for that reason. I was going to
>give up the project, but my stepmother said something
>to me about how he would have wanted me to carry on –
>he knew about the project and was very proud of the
>work I was doing. I went to New York and it was
>blissfully distracting. I wasn’t frightened, as I had
>friends and people I loved and trusted around me.
>“Nigel lost his father when he was very young and he
>said to me when they made the documentary about my
>father, ‘how wonderful you have that and what a gift
>it is to our children to really see their
>grandfather’. It was good not to feel alone – the
>world should stand still because it’s so horrible and
>unfair, you think how can everything carry on, and
>because the world did stop in a small way it was a
>comfort.”
>At this point Abigail is close to tears and I am too
>moved to speak. “I haven’t cried about it for months,”
>she says. “I was at a party last night for my
>stepmother’s new book and I guess that’s what brought
>it all to the surface.
>“Richard Briers, who played Colin in the original
>performance of Absent Friends, was there. It was so
>lovely to bump into him and talk about it.
>“I asked him what were his tips for doing Ayckbourn
>and he replied ‘I don’t know love, you’ve just got to
>play it real – it’s like Chekhov’. And he’s absolutely
>right. Ayckbourn writes about the human condition so
>beautifully.”
>Absent Friends is at Watford Palace Theatre from
>Thursday, October 2 to Saturday, October 25 at 7.45pm
>with matinees Wednesdays at 2.30pm and Saturdays at
>3pm. Tickets: 01923 225671 (£7.50-£21.50).
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