THE AYCKBOURN PLAYS–HOW MANY OF THE SIXTEEN PLAYS SHOULD BE SEEN?

THE AYCKBOURN PLAYS—HOW MANY OF THE SIXTEEN PLAYS SHOULD BE SEEN? My answer is that I would see all 16 of them if I could. I managed to see five of them in an eight day period. Do the plays taken together have a larger meaning? I saw in a couple of reviews the suggestion that what was demonstrated was simply the ingenuity of the playwright. I think that there was a larger resonance for me. I was always troubled in college literature courses by the argument that a novelist’s view of the world could be inferred from reasoning backward from the events in the plot. The 5 plays I saw worked together in the sense that they dispelled that kind of recursive thinking. The plots of the plays reflected only one of many possible courses of action without simplistic moral lessons. Taken as a whole, they also suggested that character is not destiny. The events in the plays I saw are very different and yet the characters are basically consistent. One very broad generalization may be that if a character takes action (or shows will power by resisting a cigarette), that decisiveness makes a difference in the character’s life in other areas.