Alan
Maybe that's what I mean: it sort of dies, but maybe it just gets partially buried and they dig it up. And then somebody's very pleased when they rediscover it. God knows what plays will actually survive one, if any.
They'll probably be absolutely amazing. Good Lord, when you're actually remembered for 'Absent Friends'...! ("He wrote a lot of others, you know!"). Or perhaps none at all. But as for 'Taking Steps': because a play remains on the page. someone, sometime will do it very well. And if they don't, I might, if I'm still around.
In the same way, I suppose, 'How the other half loves' should have died. It palpably was just a vehicle for Robert Morley; but it survived longer than say, with respect, 'Halfway up a Tree', which doesn't seem to be around too much - which was also a vehicle used by Robert Morley. So I suppose one could say that if the play's strong enough it'll somehow survive.

Ian
Yes, 'How the other half loves' got star-parted with Robert Morley and ran for ages.

Alan
Well, he started honestly enough: he did play it down the middle. He was an actor who rapidly got very bored, and in order to refresh himself and to engage himself he always treated the theatre as one huge game organised by himself. The joy of the man was that he did have great enjoyment from what he did, an infectious, playful enthusiasm.
Unfortunarely, the people who suffered were the people who were on stage with him. or who were attempting to get on stage with him. So there were a few working actors ploughing doggedly through their script, clutching on to their characterisations, which he almost seemed to delight in bombarding and trying to upset - hiding their props, locking the door and jumping out at them from cupboards. Which was all right but it did tend to make them look awfully ropey. It also tended to make the play look a little ropey.
In the case of 'How the other half loves' he tended to improvise round the theme quite a lot, but - because it was such a compplex plot - he was unable to do perhaps as much as he would have liked to have done with it.
I believe people like Peter Ustinov have rather stronger views about what he did to 'Halfway up a Tree', but with 'The Other Half', I didn't actually go and see it after a bit, because there was no point in getting unnecessarily upset. I was a younger, more vulnerable author then. The night I did see it, I was terribly upset, because nothing seemed to be as I had originally arranged it.

Ian
Did you clash with him personally?

Alan
I would have done if I'd been stronger and had the nerve. I would do now, certainly. At that point, I was a very new author with a very new play, and I tended to sit rather quietly and weep in corners...
The trouble with Robert's area of interest was that it didn't stop at his own performance. He was very insistent that, for instance, his leading lady should play it this way, and that somebody else should play it that way. He was in a sense an actor-manager. He wanted all the other parts play as he wanted to play it. That wasn't necessarily the way Robin Midgley (the Director) wanted them, or I wanted them.
Fiona, in 'The Other Half' is really quite a vicious character; she's not as vicious as some of her later versions, but she's an unfaithful wife who deceives her husband and plays a very sly game. Robert wouldn't have any of that. Her attitude to her husband up to the end was one of crushing and withering sarcasm a lot of the time.
Robert insisted that anyone who was on stage with him should look as if they loved him; so luckless Joan Tetzel and more luckless Jan Holden were forced to play against what the character was actually doing. I remember him quite vehemently saying: "Look, nobody wants to come to the theatre and see people squabbling" - which dismissed about three-quarters of English drama, I should have thought.
A lot of 'How the other half loves' is about people getting extremely angry with one another; and when you get into the realms of Bob and Terry, whose whole relationship is teetering on the edge of disaster, and you start laying down the law and saying; "No, you must love each other", then you aren't left with a lot of the mainspring of the play.
In that sense the quarrel was there; but as to his performance, he turned in a lovely performance as Frank. If he'd had the courage to stick to the script - or perhaps the faith to stick to the script - a little bit more closely, it could have been an even better one.
But I learned one great maxim from Robert, and this is that you can't argue with the system. Eighty per cent of the audience had paid to come and see Robert Morley, and I, as an unknown dramatist, had really no right to stand between that process if I wanted to take the money. If I could have suffocated Robert to the extent of preventing him from doing his own thing, I think I would have actually have offended many punters. They would have walked away awfully offended.

This article was put together with extracts from Ian Watson's book 'Conversations with Ayckbourn' published by Macdoald Futura Publishers.
"How the other half loves" has proved to be very popular with groups in this area, as it is a delightful comedy and every season one or two of the groups in the area have performed it. This season was no exception. The photograph of Alan Ayckbourne is by Alan Davidson and the photograph of the London production of "How the other half loves" features Heather Sears, Jan Holden and Robert Morley. Those of you familiar with the play will recognise that the photograph has been taken only a moment or two before the final curtain. RS