The Divide

by Alan Ayckbourn

seen at the Old Vic on 7 February 2018

The play, directed by Annabel Bolton, features Erin Doherty as Soween and Jake Davies as her brother Elihu, with a supporting cast of eleven, and a choir with a small orchestra (music by Christopher Nightingale). It is designed by Laura Hopkins and lit by David Plater.

When I bought the tickets, it was for a two-part production to be seen in the afternoon and evening (this was how it had been presented at last year's Edinburgh Festival). Later I had an email informing me that there would be only one part. Shortly before my attendance the now-customary email giving performance details mentioned a running time of four hours and 5 minutes. By the time I reached the theatre the running time was three hours and 45 minutes. Was I to see only unsatisfactory chunks of the original work? Or was it so much a work-in-progress that it would prove still to have too much padding? Ayckbourn has in the past been a master at complex narratives spanning more than the usual performance time - for example The Norman Conquests, three plays covering the same weekend in the dining room, the living room and the garden of a house; or, even more ambitiously, House and Garden, two plays to be performed by the same cast simultaneously on adjoining stages, requiring the audience to attend twice to perceive the technical brilliance of the stage-craft. Had something gone wrong with The Divide?

It turns out to be a very different beast from Ayckbourn's familiar social comedies. I can well believe that its six-hour version proved too unwieldy; it is very heavy on exposition and narration, as its framing device is of the older Soween reading from her recently published book based on her adolescent diaries and associated documents (official and private). For much of the time Soween in particular but also Elihu are youngsters essentially reciting their diary entries as much as participating in dramatisations of the scenes being described.

And much exposition is required, because we are far from the comfortable world of middle-class bunglers and snobs who populate so many of Ayckbourn's comedies. Instead, we are in the future, after a plague has killed most of the men, though it was transmitted by women (few of whom died). Now, men and women live in separate communities; women conceive by artificial insemination and the domestic unit comprises a 'Mama' (the birth mother) and a 'Mapa' (the other parent) and whatever children there may be - boys being sent over the Divide to the men's community in their mid teens. The whole arrangement is supported by an oppressive tradition of blame and repressive self-disgust whereby women wear puritanical black clothes while men wear white, and whenever the sexes meet (for instance, when a man is allowed into a family home to tutor a boy as he prepares to cross the Divide) the adults wear creepy face masks to avoid the possibility of further infection. If a man or boy should die of the plague, the woman held responsible for the contagion must be cruelly put to death.

We can buy into this dystopian scenario because its basic shape is presented to us through the eyes of a child - Soween is only nine years old when she starts her diary and reads out a school essay on 'where babies come from'. We can be indulgent about her misperceptions because all children's stories of this sort have their blind spots; by the time we realise that her forthright descriptions of the roles of men and women are not just the rationalisations of a child trying to make sense of the adult world, but a fairly accurate description of what everyone thinks, it is too late to object to any anomalies.

There are, it turns out, Progressives and Orthodox in the community, represented in fluctuating numbers on the village council, while from the men's side it is fairly clear that Elihu's tutor is far from toeing the party line - in fact he is dismissed from his post after encouraging the boy to become an artist. These factions and the ebband flow of their influence on the community are important as they prevent the political situation from being entirely static, but they are not the primary focus.

The strength of the play derives from the intense presentation of Soween's experience. In a highly structured environment the patterns of childhood can have a peculiar force, and Erin Doherty is superb at conveying the all-consuming importance of playground friendships, of being well thought-of and well-behaved, of being excluded from or accepted by a gang. The mysteries of the wider world are rightly on the periphery of these vital matters for much of the time, so that their significance creeps upon us, the audience, just as Soween's understanding grows slowly during her childhood. The scene where her Mapa Kest (Thusitha Jayasundera), until now an almost chillingly distant authority figure in the household, explains to her the nature of bullying and the way to endure it, is marvellously handled as the shock of this demonstration of 'paternal' care floods across Soween's face. Indeed Erin Doherty's performance commandingly holds the whole play together as Soween struggles with her loyalties, her aspirations, her self-doubt, and the dreadful burden of inherited guilt that is poisoning the whole situation.

Elihu's story provides the crisis of the evening, and Jake Davies conveys well the growing boy's outlook in such a peculiar environment, where male children are cherished but ultimately relinquished. He and Soween's friend Giella (Weruche Opia) fall in love; her Progressive parents are supportive but the outcome is disastrous for the two youngsters, even though their fate precipitates the collapse of the whole social edifice. Whether the staging of this optimistic ending after the increasing bleakness of the revelations surrounding Elihu's treatment north of the Divide and Giella's south of it is entirely convincing (rather than sentimental) I am not entirely sure. There was a hint at the beginning (when we were in the framing device of the book launch) that the situations described were now 'in the past', but the overthrow of the social order that had been crushingly successful for so long was perhaps too much of an afterthought to what was principally a very peronal coming of age story. 

However, I found the whole production both provocative and moving; in the endless debate about how adults should treat one another and their children, the play raises many (but not all) important questions from an unusual angle, reminding us that what is taken for granted may not be correct just because it is familiar. The design, using grey curtains and simple props, with projections of handwritten text and Elihu's drawings, combined with the austere costumes, provided a suitably alienating atmosphere, while the musical backing increased the sense of a community functioning very differently from our own. It was, unfortunately, difficult to make out the words being sung, and at times the music meant that the spoken text had to be amplified or even pre-recorded, but the effect was a vital part of the overall experience.