Viva Lewes Issue #157 October 2019

ON THIS MONTH: THEATRE
Psychic Connections
The Ayckbourn legacy
“When I was young
and trying to find my
own voice, it was quite
a pressure,” says Philip
Ayckbourn, the Lewesbased
playwright who
is directing his own
two-act ghost story,
Psychic Connections, at the
Lewes Little Theatre in
October. “I had to step
away from Dad’s shadow. And it’s quite a long
shadow.”
‘Dad’, of course, is Alan Ayckbourn, arguably the
country’s most successful living playwright. “It
helps open doors, and people give you a second
look when otherwise they might not have, but I
felt I had to escape that shadow. I spent twenty
years running a touring theatre company in
France, where I had relative anonymity. That’s
where I cut my theatrical teeth.”
Nowadays, long back in England, with a string of
well-received plays behind him, Philip doesn’t so
much avoid comparisons with his father, as invite
them. He’s part of the scheduling committee at
Lewes Little Theatre, and suggested, this autumn,
that there should be a double bill of ghost
stories, to help celebrate the 80th birthday of
both Ayckbourn Sr and the theatre itself. Psychic
Connections follows his father’s Haunting Julia,
which played in September.
“Both plays were a reaction to The Woman in
Black, which premiered in Scarborough Library
Theatre in 1987,” he says. “That influenced Dad
to write Haunting Julia, and, since seeing it, I
always had it in mind to write a ghost story. I
finally completed Psychic Connections three years
ago. This is its premiere.”
He gives me a brief
description of the
plot. A TV psychic
takes two punters to a
long-derelict Victorian
school in Surrey,
where she performs an
on-screen seance. She
discovers connections
between them and their
forebears, and starts
unravelling the mystery of the death of a young
girl, Alice, in the 1880s. Did she commit suicide,
or was there foul play involved?
“The action oscillates between two periods of
time,” he continues, “and, as the title suggests,
plays on the many connections between past and
present. It’s a ghost story, but becomes a detective
story, too, as the truth gradually unfolds. The
key is the psychic medium, a quirky, mysterious
woman, with a dark undercurrent.”
Philip’s mother was a sometime attender of seances,
and the playwright, who has read widely
on the subject, believes there ‘must be something
in it’. “I’ve heard too many stories to just dismiss
the whole business,” he says. “I’m not expecting
the same of my audience, but some suspension of
disbelief comes into play.”
I wonder if his father has read the script, and
what he thinks of it. “We no longer read one another’s
work,” he smiles. “We prefer to show one
another the finished product, on the stage.” So is
Alan coming to Lewes to see Psychic Connections?
And does this make Philip nervous? “He is. I’m
sure he’ll like it. Whatever the case, I’m proud
of him, and what he’s done, and to be part of his
legacy.” Alex Leith
25th Oct-2nd Nov, lewestheatre.org
39