It’s generally not a critic’s responsibility, or right, to issue a disclaimer on a playwright’s behalf. But given the overheated climate we’re living in, in which context and humor are so often lost or dismissed, it may be helpful to begin a review of Alan Ayckbourn’s 81st play by pointing out that A Brief History of Women is not, and does in any way promise to deliver, a brief history of women—at least on the scale that increasingly loaded word, history, suggests.
Instead, in Brief History, now being produced as part of 59E59 Theaters’ Brits Off Broadway series, the enduringly prolific playwright and director focuses on a single person’s journey over 60 years, a mere blink in time. That this person happens to be male may surprise or even vex the uninitiated, at least until they discover what Ayckbourn has in mind: the gentlest of seriocomic tributes, a sort of memory play in which the focus is on the struggles of others.
We first meet central character Anthony Spates, played by Antony Eden, in 1925, as a 17-year-old farm boy sent to work part-time as a footman at Kirkbridge Manor, where despite being widely disrespected or ignored he bonds with Lord Kirkbridge’s oppressed younger wife. This sets the stage for a series of encounters with women who have suffered for their longing, and find themselves drawn to Spates, a lonely figure who in Eden’s beautifully shaded performance emerges as an observer of life more than a fully engaged participant.
The action occurs in the same setting over 20-year intervals, during which the manor is converted into a prep school for girls, an arts center and a hotel—where Spates conveniently finds work as, respectively, a teacher, an administrator and a manager. (Kevin Jenkins’s cozy, canny set design provides for different rooms and spaces where actors move easily about, opening and closing invisible doors.) This is hardly the play’s only contrivance; another allows for an unlikely and bittersweet reunion in the fourth and final part, which takes place in 1985, with the now 77-year-old Spates a decade into retirement.
It will not go unnoticed that the women are defined largely in terms of their personal relationships with men. Several are professionals, and there is mention of a daughter who grows up to be a doctor, but for the most part these characters—who are identified and constrained by class, also a key issue in Brief History, as well as gender—are explored as wives, daughters or lovers. Through different eras of progress and upheaval, they are valued and judged principally for their desirability and service within a family or group—which may be part of Ayckbourn’s point, to the extent that Brief History has any larger social agenda.
But there is something to be admired, even now—particularly now, in fact—about a work that reflects unselfconsciously and with genuine appreciation on a journey apart from one’s own, even in as modest and unabashedly sentimental a spirit as Ayckbourn furnishes here. Though there are flashes of the madcap humor and darker, sharper edges he has brought to fans through a long and eclectic career, both his writing and direction are strikingly tender, especially where the female characters are concerned.
As Eden’s Spates is the only character who remains constant, and thus ages, three actresses each juggle a series of roles, as do two additional male cast members. Louise Shuttleworth is alternately droll and poignant in parts ranging from a haughty noblewoman to a frustrated performer’s neglected wife, while the ingenuous Laura Matthews amuses as a pair of spoiled aristocrats and haunts us as a passionate young woman trying to move on after her beau’s death in World War II. Frances Marshall is similarly moving as a former shopkeeper’s wife who has acquired higher status in a second marriage, but at a terrible cost.
The male characters are less fully fleshed out, and generally less sympathetic. Laurence Pears segues dutifully from well-born, boring chaps to a clownish teacher and a sullen hippie (in a strangely awkward nod to the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s); Russell Dixon has some funny moments as a flamboyantly mannered actor and director whose behavior grows uglier as the scene progresses, but the small-minded, abusive lord and tyrannical headmaster he plays in other segments are too despicable from the get-go to offer either levity or insights.
Given Spates’s humility and empathy—both underscored by the discretion and compassion of Eden’s performance—it’s little wonder the women in Brief History feel a deeper connection to him. Perhaps this dynamic seems clichéd or even patronizing, but the play’s easygoing wit and unapologetic tenderness are refreshing nonetheless.
A Brief History of Women opened May 2, 2018, and runs through May 27 at 59E59. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
