Things We Do For Love: Articles
This page contains an extract from Alan Ayckbourn's introduction to the collection Alan Ayckbourn: Plays 4, published by Faber during 2011.Preface to Alan Ayckbourn: Plays 4
Departing from my usual in-the-round venue, this became Things We Do for Love. It owed, like The Revengers’ Comedies, some of its origins in cinema.
I had seen a few years previously, a Clint Eastwood movie, In the Line of Fire, in which he plays a federal agent and includes a sequence in which he and his female partner amorously start to undress each other whilst attempting at the same time to make it as far as the bedroom, frenziedly scattering clothing, weaponry, walkie-talkies, bullet-proof vests and regulation FBI gear as they do so. This is wittily all shot from floor level so that all that can be seen are their feet as they pick their way through the piles of discarded equipment. It is essentially a cinematic visual joke but one I wanted to recreate on stage.
Taking advantage of the end stage format, the play, like a traditional doll’s house is set on three levels. The whole is Barbara’s bijou maisonette; the ground floor which she inhabits, we see all of; upstairs is a flat which she rents to her friend Nikki and Hamish, her fiancé and, when anyone’s up there, we see only their feet; finally in the basement, only the top part of which is visible, is another flat rented to Gilbert. I overcame the problem of never seeing Gilbert by having him lie on a makeshift trestle platform for sections of the play as he paints his basement ceiling.
It’s a play I’m especially fond of, marking the return to my earlier domestic scale, following the recent larger scale plays I had been producing, notably A Small Family Business, Man of The Moment and The Revengers’ Comedies.
Barbara is a virgin of some forty plus years who, apart from a secret yearning for her offstage married boss, has firmly resisted romantic entanglement with a man in any shape or form. But love eventually, unexpectedly without warning, catches up with her denial. Her long wait makes for a heavy fall. Barbara crashes and she does so, to her horror, passionately and with increasing violence, beginning to behave in ways she previously deplored in others, finally losing all dignity, self respect and ruthlessly betraying friends.
She is finally reduced, as she sees it, to the level of an animal. Love, says the poet, can raise you to the stars; it can also bring you to your knees. It has one of my bitter sweet endings, where everyone is wiser about themselves if a shade sadder for knowing it.
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