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THE AUTHOR.
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Alan Ayckbourn, the author of more than fifty plays, is possibly the most prolific dramatist in the history of the English theater, leaving Shakespeare himself—with his mere thirty-seven plays—in the dust. Put another way, since completing his first drama in 1959 at the age of twenty, Ayckbourn has written an average of five plays every four years, and generally written them under the most intense deadline pressures imaginable: beginning work sometimes less than a week before rehearsals are scheduled to start, he composes a full-length drama in a matter of days. See more about Alan Ayckbourn here.
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THE SETTING.
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Communicating Doors is set in a suite in the posh Regal Hotel in London on three different nights: one in 1974, one in 1994, and one in 2014. These scenes, however, do not unfold in chronological order. Instead, the characters travel back and forth in time, beginning in 2014 when a prostitute named Poopay finds herself transported to the mid 90s. From there, Ruella, an upper class Englishwoman, is whisked back to 1974. Poopay and Ruella time-travel repeatedly throughout the play—but they always wind up in the same physical space, that hotel suite.
Hotels are favorite locations for farce. In a hotel you are away from the constraints of home and responsibility. You may be tempted by—and in farce you will certainly succumb to—your forbidden desires without being recognized and condemned as you would be in your own parlor. Moreover, the hotel as an inherently transient space seems an appropriate setting for a play that is about the uncanny experience of being transients in time |
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THE PLOT.
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The action begins on an evening in the year 2014 in the Regal Hotel in London. Sounds of gunfire and explosions outside indicate that violent civil unrest is raging in the streets, while inside the posh hotel an elderly tycoon, Reece, is preparing to meet death and a whore. At Reece’s request his business partner, Julian, has summoned to the suite Poopay, a prostitute who describes herself as a “dominatrix.” As it turns out, however, Reece is not interested in sex. Instead he wants someone to witness his written confession which details a life of crime and corruption, “juggling with currencies and creating bankruptcies, gambling with commodities and causing famines, profiting from arms deals and bringing death.”
And in addition to all this social evil, he accuses himself of murdering his two wives, one for her money, and one because she knew too much about his nefarious dealings. Or rather, as he amends his self-accusation, he has been guilty of permitting his sinister partner, Julian—a man who claims to have murdered his own mother—to carry out the actual killings. Wife one, he explains, was drowned in a swimming pool on August 15, 1981, while, on October 5, 1994, twenty years earlier, his second spouse was thrown out the window of the very suite which he currently occupies. Now, as an act of repentance at the end of a long, wicked life, he instructs Poopay to carry his confession to his lawyer’s office. When Poopay, alarmed and appalled, refuses, Reece struggles with her physically, begging her to perform his errand. The violent exertion proves too much for his weak heart, however, and he falls unconscious at her feet. When Julian arrives, he soon discovers the handwritten confession, realizes the extent of Poopay’s incriminating knowledge, and immediately tries to murder her. Poopay flees, first hiding the confession in the bidet, and then running through a “communicating door” that supposedly leads to a spare room. Instead, the door takes her into a tiny vestibule which then rotates, depositing Poopay back into the suite—twenty years earlier. There she finds Reese’s second wife, Ruella, and discovers that it is now October 5, 1994, the night on which the latter is to die. In a panic, she tries to explain to Ruella that she has arrived from the future, that Julian is shortly to throw Ruella out the window, and that Ruella must leave the hotel as soon as possible. Believing Poopay to be mad, Ruella summons Harold, the hotel detective, who tosses the “dominatrix” out onto the street. Rattled by Poopay’s bizarre story, Ruella approaches the communicating door and hesitantly walks through it. When she emerges, she finds herself back in 1974, on the night of Reece’s wedding to his first wife, Jessica—a night they are spending in the same fateful suite. Suddenly realizing that Poopay has been telling the truth, Ruella returns to 1994, and finds that Poopay, whose real name we learn is Phoebe, has also returned to the hotel because she cannot find her flat, which has not been built yet. They proceed to piece together what has been happening. In Ruella’s words, “Somehow—across time—we’ve—linked. Been linked. You, me, and [Jessica].” They also discover that in their time travels they can only go back twenty years and then return to the present. No traveling into one’s future can occur, nor can one travel back beyond twenty years. Thus, only Ruella can communicate with Jessica, and only Phoebe can journey to 2014. Ruella realizes that she can only convince Jessica that Reece will eventually murder her by producing the handwritten confession from the first scene. But Phoebe will have to travel back to 2014 to retrieve it, thus risking another dire encounter with Julian. This she does, secures the confession, and returns to 1994. Ruella then carries the document back to 1974, only to be seized by Harold, the detective, as an intruder. Before being ejected, however, she places the confession in Jessica’s hands. Meanwhile, back in 1994, Poopay is having a bath when, through the communicating door, walks Julian, who has discovered the trick of time travel himself. As he approaches Poopay intent on her murder, the curtain falls on Act I. Act II begins in 1974 with Ruella, having been called back to the suite by a curious Jessica, vainly trying to convince wife number one of the authenticity of the confession. Failing to do so, Ruella writes a note on hotel stationery with instructions to Jessica not to open it until March 22, 1975, and returns to 1994. There she finds a shaken Phoebe who tells her that Julian, while trying to drown her in the bath, slipped on a bar of soap and killed himself in the fall. Ruella decides to involve Harold in a plot to dispose of the body, in which she convinces him to participate by offering him as a bribe the yacht he had fantasized about during their 1974 encounter. She tells Harold that she, Phoebe, and Julian had been engaged in bizarre sex when Julian died from the excitement. Harold decides to place the body in an empty suite and to strew women’s undergarments around it to suggest that Julian died in the throes of passion with a woman who then fled. Having disposed of the corpse, both Ruella and Phoebe have time to consider the implications of Julian’s death. They realize that far from guaranteeing Ruella’s safety from defenestration, the death of the 2014 Julian leaves the 1994 Julian very much alive and dangerous. Just as Ruella decides to flee the hotel, Julian arrives, intending to kill her. As they struggle on the balcony, Phoebe arrives and attempts to save Ruella, but Julian is too ruthless and clever for her, disarms her of the paper knife she is wielding, and is about to stab her when through the communicating door steps a veiled woman in black claiming to be the ghost of Julian’s murdered mother. When she lifts her veil to reveal a death’s head, Julian reels back in terror and himself falls over the balcony railing to his death. The woman in black, it turns out, is Reece’s first wife, Jessica. She has avoided being murdered thanks to the note written by Ruella. Opening it on the prescribed day, Jessica discovered that it predicted, correctly, the birth of her daughter the day before. With this evidence of Ruella’s knowledge of her future, she divorced Reece, remarried, and has been leading a happy life. Knowing from the confession of the planned murder of Ruella on this October night, she has come to the hotel not from the past or the future but from her prosperous present to thwart the crime. Their deaths averted, the three women separate, each to her own time. But when Phoebe/Poopay returns to 2014 she walks into a world vastly different from the one she left. Reece is a hale and cheerful old man. And she herself, she gradually realizes, is no longer a prostitute. The course of her life has been changed because Ruella, twenty years ago, talked Reece into adopting the thirteen year old girl who would have become Poopay. Instead, she grows up to be the successful daughter of rich and happy parents. As she realizes that in changing the course of other people’s lives she has also changed the course of her own the play ends. |
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THE CHARACTERS.
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Poopay is that old dramatic standby, a prostitute with a heart of gold. She tries to play the role of a “dominatrix,” but in fact she is constitutionally considerate and non-aggressive. Thus, rather than endanger Reece’s life by the rough sex she imagines he wants, she tries to talk him out of a sado-masochistic romp, thereby jeopardizing her own profits. When the chips are down, however, she is brave and faithful. She risks a deadly encounter with Julian to retrieve the confession that, she hopes, will save Jessica’s life. We see that she is made of human material too fine for the life of prostitution into which she has fallen, and so we are not surprised by her final metamorphosis into an accomplished and attractive young woman.
Reece appears in three different versions in the course of the play: first as the dying and corrupt tycoon, then as the newly-married thirty-year-old, just starting out in life, and finally as a happy septuagenarian who has been saved from a life of greed and murder thanks to the interventions of Poopay, Ruella, and Jessica. In his first incarnation, he is physically frail, weakened by the toxins of an evil life. And he is wracked by remorse, longing to purge his soul by confessing his crimes. As Ruella says of the same man twenty years earlier, “Have you any idea what [he’s] doing? And has done? Have you any idea at all. He should have been shot.” But all this evil comes wrapped in a curiously limp personality. He has shielded himself from full knowledge of Julian’s murderous deeds because, as Ruella sees it, “He chooses to know only what he wants to know. He never likes facing the unpleasant things in life . . . .He leaves the difficult, the nasty things—the messy things to me or the Julians of this world. If he can’t face it, it doesn’t exist.” The thirty-year-old Reece, whom we glimpse only briefly, shows clear signs of developing into this aged horror. He is extremely harsh towards Ruella, whom he takes for an intruder, and is perhaps cruelly over-eager to subject her to the ministrations of hotel security. Finally, the Reece who leads the life that has been altered by Poopay and his wives is a man at peace with himself and his family, cherishing fond memories of his late wife, Ruella, and looking forward to affectionate visits with his children. Julian, like Poopay, is a familiar type—the villainous smoothie, described in the text as “a tall powerful man . . . in good physical shape. He is very well spoken in a way that suggests that his original background could have been vastly different. Despite the time of year [summer], he is smartly dressed in an expensive dark suit.” The cultivated manner of speech suggests an upper-class background, giving us the classic melodramatic malefactor: the pathological aristocrat whose crimes have cast him from high places, the fastidious killer who dresses in elegant black when the rest of the world is sporting shorts and t-shirts. His depravity deepens with everything we learn about him: his cold-bloodedness, his relentlessness in pursuing his victims, his pleasure in killing. And like many demented fictional murderers—Norman Bates, for example—he is obsessed with his mother. The guilt he feels over killing her and the terror her specter arouses constitute his Achilles heel. Ruella stands in sharp contrast to Poopay. Where the latter is often paralyzed by dismay or confusion, Ruella exhibits a constant clear-headedness and self-confidence, even in the face of the most frightful obstacles. Her very British sangfroid is clearly on display when, having just been dangled from a sixth floor window for several terrifying minutes, she returns to safety and declares, “I don’t know about you two, but I think I’m in urgent need of the mini-bar.” Likewise, when Poopay dissolves into tears, convinced that nobody can possibly change the unalterable events of the past, Ruella offers her a verbal bracer: “Oh, don’t be so pathetic. Come on, shape up, girl. We’re going to win this. We’re going to fight it, we’re going to win it. Otherwise why were we given this chance, eh?” A cross between Margaret Thatcher and Diana Rigg, Ruella provides the guts and determination that ultimately thwart Julian’s evil and Reece’s fecklessness. And, as both her husband and Poopay say of her, she is a “good person”—a fact we see for ourselves when Ruella refuses to flee the hotel to avoid facing down Julian, “because my running away doesn’t save an innocent woman from drowning, does it? . . . And I never, never, ever run away.” Jessica we see in two versions: the twenty-five-year-old honeymooner, and the mid-forties woman-of-the-world. At both stages of her life she seems to be slightly scatter-brained, though good-natured. On her wedding night she flat-out refuses to believe the time-travelling Ruella, despite being confronted with her husband’s handwritten confession. She does deal kindly with Ruella, to whom she speaks “gently as if to a child,” saying, “I don’t think you actually mean any harm, do you? I really don’t. I just think you’re a bit—well—funny in the head.” Twenty years later, having just helped Ruella and Poopay escape from Julian, she explains her approach to that task: JESSICA: I thought . . . I might give him a fright. An unloaded gun would have provided precious little deterrent against Julian, but Jessica seems not to have thought that through. For her, it is the intention not the depth of analysis that counts.
Harold, the house detective, is described on his first entrance as, “A lugubrious man who’s seen it all several times over.” Having “seen it all,” he is cynical and tough-minded in his treatment of troublemakers, obsequious towards the posh clientele of the hotel, and utterly indifferent to any principle but self-interest. But he does have a dream: “In 1994 . . . . you know where I’ll be? Cruising the Med. Cruising. In my own boat. 42 foot. Twin screw. Flying bridge. The Med. All right? That’s where I’ll be.” This is a dream he doesn’t manage to realize in the subsequent twenty years, so that, when 1994 finally arrives, he is ripe for bribery by Ruella, who remembers this weak spot in a man otherwise completely fortified behind his walls of disillusionment. |
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THE THEMES.
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Men and Women. Many critics have noted Ayckbourn’s frequent admiring portraits of women, who often emerge as the most sympathetic characters in his plays. That is certainly the case in Communicating Doors. Poopay, Jessica, and Ruella exhibit such admirable qualities as kindness, intelligence, courage, and determination. The male characters, by contrast, present a gallery of vices: Reece’s fecklessness and greed, Harold’s cynicism, Julian’s monstrous cruelty. The only redeeming features among the male characters are to be discovered in the person of Reece as we find him in the final scene. And his virtues exist only because of the heroic exertions of the women who save him from the self he had become in the first act. We should also bear in mind that each of these women—depending on the moment in the chronological crazy quilt we choose to look at—has been murdered, or is about to be murdered by Julian and his willing accomplice, Reece. Thus it is by saving themselves from the violence of the men that the women ultimately save one man—Reece—from himself.
What if . . . People have always speculated about what the present would be like had events in the past taken a different turn. Suppose the South had won the Civil War? Suppose Germany had invaded England? Suppose Oswald had missed? Or, on a more mundane level, suppose I hadn’t gone to that party where I met my husband or my wife? Communicating Doors is an endless succession of such “supposes” in the life of a peculiarly twisted family. Ayckbourn says the play is about “the desire to re-fashion the past, ‘something we’d all like to do occasionally.’” But of course, we can’t. As a character in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night says, “The past is the present. . . .It’s the future, too.” This tragic sense of imprisonment by history is the opposite of the mood of Communicating Doors. If comedy is the form of drama that begins in distress and ends in happiness for its main characters, then Ayckbourn’s play is comedy squared. As the curtain rises, two of the main characters, Jessica and Ruella, have been murdered, a third, Poopay, will soon face death at the hands of Julian, and a fourth, Reece, is on his last legs, full of remorse for a life of wickedness. But, miraculously, through the actions of the characters and the magic potency of the “communicating doors,” all this evil is erased. By the play’s end, the murder victims are rescued from their fates—virtually resurrected from the dead— while the moribund malefactor has been transformed into a kindly old man. Harold is probably enjoying his Mediterranean idyll, and the most evil character, Julian, has been removed from the world. Ayckbourn has described this play as a “romance,” which is to say a work marked by the marvelous, the extravagant, the impossible. It is a romance in the sense that Shakespeare’s late plays are romances. In The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Pericles, Shakespeare gives us seemingly dead wives who come back to life, cruelly abandoned daughters who are found beautifully alive, fathers crushed by pain and loss who are sung back to happiness, murderous brothers thwarted by good fairies, victims of shipwreck impossibly saved from the cruel sea. Loss is restored, pain healed, death overcome through love and bravery. Communicating Doors partakes of the spirit of these romances, plays in which our longing for the good is fulfilled through the poetry of the stage. |
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.
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1. Why do people fantasize about traveling through time?
2. Which is the more appealing idea: traveling to the future, or the past? Why? 3. Why does Reece allow Julian to kill his wives? 4. There is a civil war going on in London at the start of Act I in 2014. Is it still going on as the play ends in 2014? 5. Where would Jessica have wound up if she had gone through her “communicating door?” 6. What does Poopay’s transformation at the end of the play suggest about the importance of education? 7. Why does Julian’s body disappear? 8. Why is Reece so much healthier as the play ends? 9. Do you think you can change the future? How? 10. If you reinterpret the past, for example by insisting that Hitler was a saint, can you change the present? |