A Brief History of Women

Theater review by Helen Shaw

The title of Alan Ayckbourn's wistful comedy A Brief History of Women is a bit of a trick. The play isn't brief (it runs a leisurely two and half hours) and its barrels of history are not exactly “of” women. It has many ladies, but it’s about a man—it’s so focused on him, in fact, that we can only hear a scene if he enters it. When Tony (Antony Eden) stands outside a door on Kevin Jenkins’s clever cutaway set, the people inside the room mouth lines and gesture in silence; when he opens the door, sound floods in. Tony is the type to hear a great deal, so despite his essential meekness, his story includes dramatic fights, marital meltdowns and even one violent death.

At first, Tony is a bright 17-year-old, picking up butler work at a stately manor in 1925; then, quick as a flash, it’s twenty years later and the house has turned into a school, where Tony woos a fragile young war widow. In the ’60s, the estate has become an arts center, run by an ever more diffident Tony; when 1985 marches brightly in, the house has been inevitably converted into a posh hotel. In each era, the genre shifts (there’s a panto rehearsal in the third act that’s worth the price of admission), but somehow the man barely changes: Tony ends the play just as he began it, bowing people into rooms too expensive for him. Women, meanwhile, have undergone a revolution—painfully, shyly, and often leaning on sweet Tony’s arm.

Ayckbourn is past master of theatrical innovation (as in House & Garden andThe Norman Conquests), and he’s 81 plays into his career. One of the key pleasures of A Brief History lies in admiring a peak craftsman at work. Everything fits together beautifully, from the third-person limited perspective—so familiar in novels, so rare onstage—to the graceful counterbalancing of scene against scene. The Stephen Joseph Theatre (of North Yorkshire, England) has given him a strong cast, particularly the superb ranter Russell Dixon, who plays misogyny in three different keys, and Louise Shuttleworth, who manages moments of real pathos amidst the time-hopping hurly-burly. The surprise star, though, is Jenkins’s set, which crams a ballroom, paneled study and marbled hallway onto the small 59E59 mainstage. Watching it change from elegance to raffishness and back again, putting on different identities (a fireplace becomes a heater, chairs get increasingly comfortable), is somehow very poignant. You feel somehow that years from now it will still be uptown, waiting patiently long after its human comedy has gone.

59E59 Theaters (Off Broadway). Written and directed by Alan Ayckbourn. With ensemble cast. Running time: 2hrs 30mins. One intermission.