Bringing Bertie and ‘Jeeves’ to Westwood

Hardly any playwright earns a comfortable income exclusively from the stage. But certainly Alan Ayckbourn would be at the top of the short list of those who do.

A director as well as the acclaimed writer of 52 plays (including “Absurd Person Singular,” “The Norman Conquests,” “How the Other Half Loves”), Ayckbourn has never written or directed for film or TV. Some of his plays have been seen on TV, but only one, “A Chorus of Disapproval,” became a feature film--a movie that Ayckbourn dismisses as “a show to go to bed to. ‘Death Wish 6,’ I call it.”

Recently Ayckbourn worked for the first time in Los Angeles, the world’s movie-making capital. Typically, however, he was on a theater stage, not a sound stage.

He was directing “By Jeeves,” a musical collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber, inspired by P.G. Wodehouse’s tales of the young aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his brilliant butler Jeeves. A new version of their 1975 London production, it opens tonight at the Geffen Playhouse.

This was hardly Ayckbourn’s first West Coast offer. A few years ago, he said, a major studio asked him to come to Hollywood to adapt and direct a movie of one of his plays. But his services would have been required for nearly a year.

Ayckbourn declined. “If I left my theater for a year, it would close,” he said, referring to the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the seaside town of Scarborough, England, where he has been artistic director since 1971 and where his plays are initially produced. “It needs new work from me to keep it running.” If he had gone to Hollywood, “I would have completely uprooted myself and put 20 people out of work--people who had lashed themselves to the mast for me.”

Indeed, Ayckbourn left Los Angeles before opening night of “By Jeeves” to attend to some theater business back home.

Not that Ayckbourn minds leaving Scarborough for shorter trips. “It can be horribly insular to sit in the same town, directing for the same people,” he said. Ayckbourn has taken “By Jeeves” to four stops--Scarborough, London, Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn., and L.A., adapting it for each new stage. He’ll do it again for its June run at Washington’s Kennedy Center.

All that effort is for a show that, he said, “has to look sort of accidental, uncoordinated, artless. The one enemy it has is slickness.”

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The premise of “By Jeeves” is that a missing banjo prevents Bertie from performing a scheduled recital at a church hall, forcing him and Jeeves to concoct an alternative entertainment. “Sometimes I say [to other members of the production team], ‘You’d better stop now because it’s starting to look good. You have to have enough lack of ego to do this show badly,’ ” Ayckbourn said.

It hardly sounds like a Lloyd Webber show. But Ayckbourn says Lloyd Webber told him that “the big musical is dead.” This was before the cancellation of the Broadway run of Lloyd Webber’s “Whistle Down the Wind”--smaller than many of his shows but much bigger than “By Jeeves”--

“His feeling is that it’s becoming so impossible to recoup expenses that there’s very little room for artistic maneuvering,” Ayckbourn said. “He’s excited by doing a show that has far less resting on it. He’s known for grandiose things, but he has a great sense of fun. My memory of working with him is of laughing a lot.”

Their initial collaboration, called just “Jeeves,” was one of the West End’s legendary flops in 1975. “It was Armageddon,” Ayckbourn said. “Andrew and I got along well, but everybody else shouted at us and we at them. It was a boat filling with water.”

On the show’s first opening night in Bristol, “Jeeves” lasted nearly five hours--a problem that partially stemmed from the flavor of Jeeves creator Wodehouse’s work, which isn’t “easy to bottle,” Ayckbourn said. “It’s funny, but it’s all in the descriptive passages. There’s a sense of leisure--the characters just roll along. But musicals are sharper, faster, more impatient.”

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Ayckbourn (as librettist, lyricist and director) and Lloyd Webber understated this time around, Ayckbourn said. They kept some of the songs from 1975 but started from scratch on the book, determined to keep it shorter.

A new character, Cyrus Budge III, “the thick son of an American jam magnate,” replaces Wodehouse’s character of Roderick Spode, an English proto-fascist, in this version. “Bertie needs a threat. But Roderick was no longer as funny as he used to be. The climate has changed. I wanted the show to have an innocence, so Roderick got the boot.” Still, Cyrus could have come “directly from the Wodehouse stable,” Ayckbourn said.

Only a few original Wodehouse lines are intact, but “I hope I’ve caught the spirit,” he added. He was “very worried that women didn’t respond to Wodehouse as much as men, that the women characters were used only to chase or terrify Bertie.” He figured that there must be some reason for the women’s pursuit, so he decided to make Bertie more attractive than he has been in some other guises--”a fraction more sexy, less silly ass,” sans monocles. And he’s a bit brighter--”you don’t want a blithering idiot on stage for two hours.”

Ayckbourn writes primarily about England’s middle class, of which he considers himself a member. The subject matter of “By Jeeves” is a departure--but he has known aristocrats in his time, he said. Besides, “By Jeeves” is hardly a documentary--”in one sense,” Ayckbourn said, “it’s a little world that never existed.”

* “By Jeeves,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends April 6. $27.50-$40. (310) 208-5454.

* Ayckbourn’s “How the Other Half Loves” plays at South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, May 23-June 29. (714) 957-4033.