Just Between Ourselves: Articles by Alan Ayckbourn

This section contains various articles about Just Between Ourselves written by Alan Ayckbourn. Click on a link in the column below to access other articles.

Introduction to Joking Apart & Other Plays

Articles by Alan Ayckbourn

○ Notes on Dennis
○ Thoughts on Just Between Ourselves

Articles by Other Authors

○ State of the Nation
Just Between Ourselves, Ten Times Table and Joking Apart could be described as the first of my 'winter' plays. Unlike their predecessors, which were all written in late spring for performance during the Scarborough summer season, these three were all composed in December for performance in January. I mention this not because I am a strong believer that the time of the year wields some astrological influence over what one writes (though I would never rule this out either). In a more practical way, though, this shift of my established writing pattern did, to some extent, alter my priorities. By the winter of 1975-6, the Scarborough Theatre-in-the-Round Company which I direct had made its first tentative steps towards a year-round playing pattern.

This had long been an ambition of mine. After twenty years or so of being exclusively a summer rep we were at last establishing some sort of deeper permanency within the town. To encourage and develop our much needed winter audience, I launched my latest play, Just Between Ourselves, at a time when it would, we hoped, do the most good for the box office. At the same time, the pressure that had always been on me to produce a play suited primarily to a holiday audience was no longer there.

As is customary, I wrote mainly at night - but this was my first experience of tackling a play whilst the North Sea storms hurtled round the house, slates cascaded from the roof and metal chimney cowlings were bounced off parked cars below my window, rebounding hither and thither like demented pinballs. Not surprisingly, the result was a rather sad (some say a rather savage) play with themes concerned with total lack of under-standing, with growing old and with spiritual and mental collapse. Dennis, the husband, is no calculating villain. Nor is he, I contend, particularly unusual. Just a man pathologically incapable of understanding beyond a certain level. His wife's cries for help go unanswered not because he ignores them or fails to hear them but because he honestly hasn't the slightest idea what they're about

The wife, Vera, hampered by a lack of ability to express herself clearly or maybe too inhibited to do so, suffers from a conventional upbringing that has taught her that the odds on her being wrong and her husband being right are high. Slowly, the last vestiges of self-confidence are drained from her. Vera sits empty, huddled and withdrawn in the garden, unwilling to go back into a house that is no longer hers.

Occasionally, and I'm glad to say it is only occasionally, it has been suggested that the whole piece might benefit from a more cheerful ending wherein Vera miraculously revives and all becomes right with the world. Perhaps a few years earlier, I might have paid such suggestions serious attention.

In resisting them and allowing, Just Between Ourselves to end as it does, I felt I took a large stride towards maturity as a playwright. It continued my small progress, first started in Absent Friends, towards my unattainable goal: to write a totally effortless, totally truthful, unforced comedy shaped like a flawless diamond in which one can see a million reflections, both one's own and other people's.

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