THE DIVIDE by Alan Ayckbourn -- a review

THE DIVIDE by Alan Ayckbourn (PS Publishing)

Review by Gary Fry

It’s always been difficult to keep up with Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s prolific output. I try my best. Of the 83 stage plays he’s written since the 1960s – from early undisputed classics such as The Norman Conquests and Absurd Person Singular to tricksy modern masterworks like Arrivals and Departures and (his very latest) Birthdays Past, Birthdays Present – I’ve seen or read about 70. The range of his work is striking, including straight adult dramas (with often ingenious structures), genre material (sci-fi, thrillers, ghost stories), musicals, and children’s plays. And now he’s added a new form to his repertoire, the literary novel. Slow down, man! You’re giving me whiplash!

Although The Divide was conceived and written as a novel, it was first presented onstage (in a shortened version) as a rehearsed reading (or a “narrative for voices”), a treat for regulars during the Stephen Joseph Theatre’s 60^th anniversary events. This live production in Scarborough, nudging eight hours, was later adapted (not by Ayckbourn) as a play produced at London’s Old Vic. The play, bearing little resemblance to the author’s original conception, received mixed reviews, with some celebrating its timely exploration of gender relations (as if Ayckbourn hadn’t spent his whole career poking around in such fractious territory) and others suggesting that the piece would work better in book form. But of course, that was how the author had first planned it. And so here it is at last, The Divide as the novel it was always intended to be.

The piece, in my view, pulls together two strands of Ayckbourn’s previous work: his various dabblings in sci-fi (Surprises, Henceforward, Comic Potential, to name but a few) and his frequent work for children. Indeed, despite exploring some decidedly mature themes – oriented around what we might crudely call the gender wars – The Divide reads like a Young Adult novel.

The story is set about a hundred years in the future. A plague has rendered relationships between men and women nigh on impossible and, consequently, the country has been divided in half, with all the men to the north and the women to the south. Male children, however, remain with their two mothers (Mama and Mapa) in the south until old enough to make the journey north.

The plot is largely conveyed through diary entries of a daughter and a son coming of age in this grave new world. There are other contributions, including meeting minutes from a local authority in which the two youths live (a microcosmic representation of broader political trends, methinks). We also get to read letters from other characters, as well as various flyers and memos, all of which round out the depiction of a society functioning in paranoiac mode, of new legislation prohibiting the liberties that we – yes, even in our ostensibly oppressive times – take for granted. This is a world turned upside down, as the phrase goes. Heterosexuality is illegal, art is pornography, and Vanity is elevated to the worst sin of all.

If all this hint at a new prudishness, a systemic response to the age-old problem of controlling passions arising from human nature, there is satire here. The mores of Ayckbourn’s exaggerated world might be taken as the ultimate consequence of pursuing contemporary fundamentalist solutions to conflict between the genders. I won’t get waylaid by such contentious debates – let each reader take what they will from the worldbuilding – but I will state that many aspects of this future are grimly imagined. For instance, a Ten Day Collar, attached to a female found guilty of deliberately contaminating a male, put me in mind of brutal aspects of the similarly themed The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Divide, however, is lighter in tone than Margaret Atwood’s celebrated novel. This arises entirely from its focus on two youngsters, both documenting their daily reflections and concerns in private. Their lived worlds are fleshed out in convincing detail, each of them revealing the eternal travails of being pre/postpubescent whatever the social circumstances. The diary entries read like the kind of mini-monologues so many characters in Ayckbourn’s plays deliver, usually when someone else is just listening (or commonly, pretending to listen). The author’s mastery of articulating people’s inner feelings lends the book a relentless readability. There was an obvious risk in assigning to only two characters the great majority of the narrative, but both Soween and her elder brother Elihu are so sympathetically engaging that the story remains hugely enjoyable throughout.

Less positively, I did occasionally think, during some dramatic episodes, how much more satisfying the scenes would play in situ, drawing on the author’s peerless dialogue. There is a hint at such potential richness in the verbatim transcript of a court case (a very funny scene), but otherwise we’re left with exposition from those who have recently observed or participated in events alluded to. This is the unavoidable consequence of telling a story in an epistolary manner, a problem of form rather than execution. All the same, from such a great dramatist, it’s hard not to yearn sometimes for a live action telling.

But we needn’t dwell on overly fussy negatives. When Soween and Elihu fall in love with the same person (Giella, the feisty daughter of politically progressive parents), the novel becomes a version of Romeo and Juliet, with all the tragic implications inherent in that cultural enclave. In my estimation the subtext of this tale is the irrepressibility of human nature. The siblings’ surname is Clay, but can either be moulded in any old fashion? No, says Ayckbourn, but rather than thump a tub to this (or the alternative) effect, as so many ideologically motivated people do in our own time, he skilfully dramatises the observation, delicately depicting the youthful awakening of sexuality and love in circumstances not of his characters’ choosing. That is the purpose and value of the kind of art that is banned in the novel, and The Divide is a convincing testament to such timeless verities.

The Divide is available from PS Publishing: https://www.pspublishing.co.uk/the-divide-hardcover-alan-ayckbourn-4900-p.asp