Innovative ‘House’ and ‘Garden’ Party

Many people start thinking of retirement at 60. Not Sir Alan Ayckbourn.

The veteran British dramatist marked the milestone last year by writing “a birthday present for myself”--two plays running at the same time in separate theaters, featuring one cast.

The separate but intricately related “House” and “Garden” constitute a singular theatrical event. Premiered last year at Ayckbourn’s home theater in the Yorkshire coastal town of Scarborough, they opened Aug. 9 at the Royal National Theater, where they are running in repertory with--among other plays--”Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet.”

Both plays are sold out for the run. Theatergoers may see them in the order of their choice, or just see one.

“House” is a wrenching but also hilarious drama about a wife, Jane Asher’s deliciously cool Trish Platt, so fed up with her philandering businessman-husband Teddy (David Haig) that she has rendered him invisible. (“Marry a Platt, and that’s that” is her concise estimation of events.)

The extent of Teddy’s indiscretions are plain for all to see in “Garden,” which takes place on the extensive grounds of the lushly appointed suburban home where “House” is set.

Both plays end with the same line, “Ah well, that’s life, I suppose,” and an extended curtain call, as the 32-strong company hotfoots it through the National’s backstage labyrinth to take their bows in two separate auditoriums. (Ayckbourn estimates the dash can take 87 seconds.)

A garden fete follows in the National auditorium, replicating offstage the activities that the people in “House” and “Garden” are preparing for onstage.

“It was intended as a party,” says Ayckbourn, who adds, “There are things that come off them, I hope--how we are all walk-ons in other people’s lives.”

And so it is: While Teddy chugs back and forth between shows, playing one character before two different audiences, some characters feature more prominently in one script than the other.

The wonderfully named Gavin Ryng-Mayne (Malcolm Sinclair), a visiting novelist with a seductive manner as smooth as his silken hair, has a scene to freeze the blood in “House,” while the sillier and more amorphous “Garden” is largely given over to the separate marital woes of neighboring doctor Giles (Michael Siberry) and his hysteric of a wife, Joanna (Sian Thomas).

Asher--a well-known and admired English actress--commandeers “House,” playing an Ibsen-style heroine who won’t be done in by domestic malaise. But she gets a scant single scene in “Garden,” peering over a garden wall.

Characteristically for Ayckbourn, relationships come in for a rough critique throughout, although “House” at least suggests that the younger generation may get it right where their parents have failed.

Just as typical is the playwright’s sheer love of craft and of theatrical invention. He has written nearly as many plays--56--as he is years old.

For instance, his 1984 show “Intimate Exchanges” features 16 possible endings, while an early Ayckbourn hit from 1973, “The Norman Conquests,” views the same events from the garden, the sitting room and the dining room; unlike “House” and “Garden,” those plays aren’t meant to be performed simultaneously.

“Bedroom Farce” in 1975 was a series of virtually cinematic crosscuts, just as a more recent play, “The Revengers’ Comedies,” unfolded a tale of vengeance across nearly six hours and two halves. Last year’s West End entry, the satiric “Comic Potential,” opens off Broadway at the Manhattan Theater Club in November. Janie Dee reprises her Olivier Award-winning performance as an “actoid”--a robotic actor programmed to feel emotion.

“These are all ingredients that are available to a dramatist,” says Ayckbourn, who has a new play, “Virtual Reality,” in which the action takes place almost entirely on mobile phones. Already seen in Scarborough, that play is awaiting a London run next year.

“I hope I don’t write too many pure gimmicks,” he goes on, “but I do love events, and particularly when you run a theater year in and year out, you have to keep drawing attention occasionally to the fact that you’re there.”

The plays are a pleasure for actors too, not least the marathon demands of “House” and “Garden.” David Haig, the plays’ indefatigable 44-year-old star chuckles, “I’m fitter now than I was, say, on May 2.”

Ayckbourn, for his part, has no plans to forsake his own marathon playwriting.

“I’m 56 plays in,” he says, “and maybe I’ll do a few more. I just want to keep going.”