From Simon Gray to Alan Ayckbourn, many playwrights have kept their most interesting roles out of sight – but very much in mind
Rowan Atkinson dominates the posters for a West End production opening this week – a wise calculation that the chance to see on stage the comedian internationally famous as Mr Bean is a major selling point. But another attraction of Quartermaine's Terms, in which Atkinson plays the title role of a baffled bachelor teacher, is the fact that other parts in the play require no actors at all.
The 1981 drama by the late Simon Gray is one of the strongest examples in modern theatre of the use of off-stage characters. Set in an English-language school for foreign students in Cambridge in the 1960s, the script calls for seven members of staff – including, in addition to Quartermaine, fussy principal Eddie Loomis, bluff senior tutor Henry Windscape and elementary conversation teacher Anita Manchip. (The eccentric surnames were encouraged by the fact that Gray had once suffered the agony of creating an unpleasant character who shared the name of a living, and litigious, individual.)
Despite being a chamber work, Quartermaine's Terms often feels Dickensianly busy because we become familiar with several unseen people, the subject of recurrent references and anecdotes: Thomas Cull, Eddie's lover and co-founder of the school; Susan Windscape, Henry's precocious but troubled adolescent daughter; Nigel Manchip, Anita's husband, who is launching a literary magazine with the assistance of keen female undergraduates.
Although these figures remain mere figures of speech, we follow and even visualise them almost as closely as anyone on stage. Without spoiling the plot, these absent dramatis personae come to notably sad ends; at least four (by some counts, five) of them die during the action, in ways that probably include murder and suicide.
These hyper-textual lives were a particular trick of Gray's: others of his dramas, including The Common Pursuit and Butley, also feature wives, parents, husbands and children who never appear, yet who strongly inhabit our imagination. It's tempting to think that Gray's facility at this technique is because he had begun his writing career as a novelist, and ended it as a bestselling diarist – both professions that depend on the ability to build character sketches through a few sentences or carefully selected details.
Gray's plays are not, of course, the only ones to deploy unseen protagonists. In both Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party, the person who gives their name to the drama is a catalyst for the events we see but remains hidden. Godot, the best known no-show in theatre history, is most likely an illusion who cruelly gives false purpose to the lives of the tramps Vladimir and Estragon; while, in Leigh's play, Abigail is an unseen teenage girl, holding her first ever party next door – a soiree that has no significance other than driving her mother to accept an invitation from her neighbour, Beverly, to the ghastly social-climbing cheese and wine party.
The functions of these shadowy people, though, are different. Whereas we need to register the absence of Godot for Beckett's play to make sense, Abigail is such a narrative irrelevance that quiz-setters can reliably get away with the trick question: "What was the name of the hostess played by Alison Steadman in the drama Abigail's Party?" It is, though, likely that the strong sense of life elsewhere – that we are simply seeing scenes in only one home in a road – resulted from Leigh's improvisational working methods, in which each actor is presenting just one slice of a fully imagined life.
Alan Ayckbourn, a great experimenter with dramatic convention, has also powerfully employed characters who are literally just beyond our vision, through doors or stairs that lead from the set. The three acts of Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular (1972) take place in three different kitchens, featuring six people seeking refuge from Christmas parties happening in living rooms that – we vividly believe – are located just beyond the wings.
Intriguingly, in an introduction to the published script, Ayckbourn admits that the first draft of the play dramatised a full-scale party, until he decided to make the script an "off-stage action play", realising that invisible characters can be as significant as their on-stage counterparts. The idea later resulted in Ayckbourn's thrilling double bill of House and Garden (2000), two plays written to be staged simultaneously in adjoining theatres, in which, when someone exits the stage in one play, they enter the action of the other.
Ayckbourn's interlocking comedies are so expensive to mount – requiring two linked auditoria between which the actors dash – that they have not been performed as often as they deserve. In other cases, though, off-stage action is often a way of countering the economies of cast size. The simplest dramatic form, the monologue, often compensates by crowding the stage through implication, as audiences will discover at the New Vic in Newcastle-under-Lyme, the latest theatre to revive Alan Bennett's solo pieces, Talking Heads. In one Bennett monologue, A Woman of No Importance, narrated by an office busybody called Peggy Schofield succumbing to terminal illness, there is a vast cast of other characters summoned up in a few words, including the memorable sketch of "Mr Creswell and Mr Rudyard, sat there with all the maintenance men, some of them in their overalls".
Proving Ayckbourn's rule, Bennett peoples his monologues with a cast of hundreds, just as Quartermaine's Terms is a seven-hander with at least a dozen major characters. Some of the best drama can be in things we never see.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/jan/28/waiting-wings-offstage-characters-theatre
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