Had the country not gone into lockdown, this month would have seen Sir Alan Ayckbourn talking to the Stephen Joseph Theatre Book Club about his debut novel The Divide.

As the meeting did not take place, the Book Club members were invited to submit questions to the playwright about The Divide, which he responded to. The SJT Book Club has kindly allowed the Ayckbourn blog to reprint Sir Alan’s answers.

The Divide was published by PS Publishing during September 2019 and is a tragic love story set in a future England which has been devastated by a plague. Contact between the opposite sexes is fatal and, as a result, men and women have been forcibly separated by the ‘Divide’.

Questions About Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s The Divide

Over 80 plays and now a novel. How and why?

Alan Ayckbourn: I found, now I’m not quite so involved with running a theatre (!) that when I was not occupied with rehearsals for my two-yearly productions, I had considerably more rest- of-the-year writing time. Having that year completed next year’s play early, I set myself a project which was originally never intended as a play or even a novel but an abstract project with an impossibly large, financially impractical scale. I think inevitably as I got further into the writing it took on the form of a graphic play or a dramatic novel. A sort of cross between the two genres, really.

What is it about this story that made you want to write it in a different format? Were you attracted to it as a challenge?

Yes, a challenge, in a way. The writer in me saying to the director, “Go on, put that on stage if you can, if you dare!” If I’d originally approached it as a play, I would have probably restricted the piece to a maximum of two or three locations or perhaps chosen to make the setting unspecified and location- less. I’d also have concentrated the story, so it was told by a dozen or less characters. Playwriting for me is essentially about minimalism. Not just for financial or practical reasons but artistic ones as well. I’ve always admired artists in other media who achieve this. Painters who can convey so much with so few lines; musicians who can do likewise with so few notes.

Why was it best to use diary / documents rather than narration / soliloquies?

My stock in trade is dialogue. It’s when I feel I’m at my strongest. My stage directions are brief and practical and where I feel least comfortable. No Bernard Shaw or Arthur Miller, I! The diary form came naturally, the boy and girl speaking directly and unselfconsciously from their hearts. Soliloquies, in a sense. The rest is reported dialogue, be they Village Council Meetings or the numerous inter-departmental memos and e-mails that fly to and fro between officials.

Did you feel / expect a novel would reach a new / different audience?

I hoped it would. A novel is a very one to one process. With plays over several live performances I can watch audience reaction night by night. Mind you, these days I rarely change anything during those early performances, apart from perhaps the odd tiny timing detail, usually after discussion with the performers. But the information I glean from that experience certainly informs me when I sit down to write the next one. With a book it’s a bit like closing your eyes and throwing it down a well and then waiting for the splash that never comes. I don’t know how these professional novelists cope without feedback, I really don’t.

While the woman’s side of the wall was far from ideal, it didn’t seem dangerous. Do you believe men are naturally, and irredeemably, more violent?

I think sadly, without the moderating influence of women, they probably are. Mind you, women unfortunately are very often the root cause of a great deal of male violence, inadvertent or otherwise, too! But on balance I believe if the sexes faced permanent separation, their respective behaviours in The Divide would probably be the result. There is violence on the women’s side too, of course, but it’s generally more oblique. Rather like the emotional bullying I understand goes on in girls’ boarding schools. In The Divide, Axi’s calculatingly cruel treatment of poor Soween year after year is a case in point. A commercial hire boat owner once told me he made it a rule never to rent to single sex groups. He’d had too many boats wrecked that way. In many respects the women behaved worse than the men. So maybe the moral is that whilst men and women living side by side occasionally create all sorts of potentially violent sexual tensions between them, living apart can prove just as frustratingly destructive.

You can learn more about The Divide at Alan Ayckbourn’s Official Website here and if you’re interested in reading it, it is available from PS Publishing and Amazon.

With thanks to the SJT Book Club, further details of which can be found here.

This article is copyright of Haydonning Ltd. Please do not reproduce without permission of the copyright holder.