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"A Small Family Business": a play by Alan Ayckbourn

A comedy about how easily moral standards can be corrupted

By John WelfordPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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Alan Ayckbourn (born 12th April 1939) has been a mainstay of British comedy drama for many years, with more than 80 plays to his name, nearly all of which have premiered in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, where Ayckbourn was the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre (formerly the Library Theatre) from 1972 to 2008. “A Small Family Business” was one of only four plays not to have been premiered there, having been produced during a short sabbatical that Ayckbourn took at the National Theatre in London. It was first staged on 21st May 1987.

Sir Alan Ayckbourn

The Plot

The small family business in question is Ayres and Graces, a furniture-making business that Jack McCracken, previously a manager at a frozen-foods company, is about to take over from Ken Ayres, his elderly father-in-law. The play opens as Poppy, Jack’s wife, is throwing a surprise celebration party for him, with all the family present. All well and good? Well, not exactly!

Jack is keen to emphasise the benefits of honesty in business, and makes a speech to this effect. Corruption has no place in a family firm like Ayres and Graces, and Jack is determined that standards will not slip while he is in charge, with not so much as a paper clip being unaccounted for. Perhaps he is as frozen in his attitudes as the foods for which he was formerly responsible.

However, his ice-cold confidence in family probity starts to thaw when Benedict Hough arrives at the party. Benedict is a private detective who promptly announces that Jack’s 16-year-old daughter Samantha (known as Sammy), has been caught on camera shoplifting at a local store. The items in question are worth the princely sum of one pound, eighty-seven pence, but a crime has been committed nonetheless. Sammy clearly does not share her father’s moral rectitude, maintaining that “everybody steals things”, and her mother and elder sister Tina also take a very liberal line over her fall from grace, admitting that they have not been totally honest in the past themselves.

Benedict Hough’s morals take a nosedive when he offers to overlook the offence in return for a job with Ayres and Graces, an attitude which horrifies Jack who will not hear of such a thing, even if it gets his own teenage daughter off the hook.

However, when Ken tells Jack about his fears that the firm’s furniture designs are being used by a rival firm, run by an Italian family, and that there must be a spy in the Ayres/McCracken family, Jack realises that he needs to hire Benedict Hough after all. As soon he does so, Hough agrees to drop the shoplifting charge, thus bringing Jack within the web of corruption that he had every intention of escaping.

Hough tells Jack that the rival firm is run by the five Rivetti brothers, whom Jack knows are contacts of his brother Cliff. He goes to Cliff’s house to confront him, only to discover that Cliff is not there but Cliff’s wife Anita is, entertaining herself with the Rivetti brothers. It transpires that Cliff has been buying the firm’s furniture at cost price and selling it on to the Rivettis.

Jack decides to call a family meeting, at which it becomes clear that his son Desmond is behind the whole scheme, as he is using the Rivettis’ money to fund a restaurant business of his own. Indeed, there would appear to be no member of the family who does not have a vested interest in the fiddle.

Hough also knows about the fraud at the heart of the business and is in a position to blackmail Jack, who offers to pay him off. However, Hough wants more than he is being offered, at which Jack leaves to ask the other family members to raise more cash, but they decide that the best plan is to hire one of the Rivettis to murder Hough.

Hough, in searching for the money for himself, comes across Poppy and her two daughters. There is a fight and Hough is killed.

The Rivettis offer to dispose of the body, but there is a price to be paid, which should surely come as no surprise. This involves using Ayres and Graces as a front for the brothers’ drug distribution business. Jack agrees, but his moral degradation has now reached the point where he is able to make a speech that echoes the one with which he started the play, justifying his actions on moral grounds. What he cannot see, but the audience can, is Sammy in the bathroom, suffering from the symptoms of her own drug addiction, which was the reason why she was shoplifting in the first place.

Staging the play

The set for this play is necessarily complex, having been likened by the playwright to a “giant doll’s house” in which a number of rooms are visible at the same time, on two levels, acting as the homes of all the family members. This helps to convey the impression of everything taking place within one family, under the same corrupt roof that nobody can escape from.

This sort of set, with its multiple connecting doors, is reminiscent of that typical of British bedroom farce, with people being caught “in the act” and having to hide in closets and adjoining rooms when husbands or clergymen turn up unexpectedly. However, Ayckbourn writes comedy, not farce, although the farcical element is not far away with the five Rivettis popping in and out in such a manner that they can all be played by the same actor, and often are. The link between Italian businessmen, the Mafia and drug trafficking is also perhaps too easily made in creating a standard crime family a la “The Godfather”.

The play’s references to Thatcherism

Ayckbourn seeks to entertain, but he also has messages to convey, this one being about the ease with which high moral purposes can be corrupted almost without the people involved being aware of the fact. If circumstances dictate an extreme course of action, even murder, it would appear that justifications can be found before long. The action takes place over a single week, but the rapid progress from petty shoplifting to murder and drug trafficking does not seem to be all that unlikely within Ayres and Graces, as presented to us on stage.

It has been suggested that “A small family business” is a satirical comment on Thatcherism and the philosophy of the time that prompted people to look after “number one” first and foremost and neglect any moral imperatives they might once have adhered to. This philosophy was clearly stated by Margaret Thatcher herself in the same year that “A small family business” was first staged, when she declared that “there is no such thing as Society” and that our first duty as citizens is to “look after ourselves”.

It is worth noting that 1987 was the year not only of “A small family business” but also Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”, in which the character Gordon Gecko utters the famous dictum that “greed is good”. British TV viewers would soon be entertained by Harry Enfield’s character “Loadsamoney”, who typified the “Tory yuppie” culture that Thatcherism had spawned. It would be another four years before the business empire created by Robert Maxwell would be revealed for the sham that it was, but in 1987 he was fully enmeshed in building the house of cards that would eventually collapse, in a larger version of Ayckbourn’s “family business”.

Margaret Thatcher first took office in 1979, and was only three weeks away from landing another thumping majority (her third) at the time that this play was first staged. Many people clearly felt that they had benefitted from Thatcherism, and whether Ayckbourn’s audiences saw themselves in the characters on stage is a moot point. Perhaps the play should be seen as a warning against what such attitudes could lead to, although comedy will usually take things further than the events that happen in the real world.

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About the Creator

John Welford

I am a retired librarian, having spent most of my career in academic and industrial libraries.

I write on a number of subjects and also write stories as a member of the "Hinckley Scribblers".

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