Alan Ayckbourn’s Concerns in Gosforth’s Fete and How He Achieves Them

Alan Ayckbourn’s Concerns in Gosforth’s Fete and How He Achieves Them

“Gosforth’s Fete” is the fourth play in a collection called

“Confusions”. The collection consists of five plays which are loosely

linked and bring out various issues and concerns. All five of the

plays share a common concern: relationship breakdown. The plays were

set and written in 1977 by Alan Ayckbourn, one of the most creative

and productive writers in England at the time, having written on

average, one full-length play or comedy since 1965 up until 1986 where

he took a two year break to direct and run a company at the National

Theatre in London, returning to work in 1988. Alan Ayckbourn’s

technique is to usually take an ordinary situation and setting and

play with it for entertainment, while drawing his attention to his

serious concerns and heightening the awfulness of the concerns through

comedy. I chose to write about “Gosforth’s Fete” because Alan

Ayckbourn shows his technique well in this play. Anything that can go

wrong in the preparations for the fete does so, the same occurs

between the people who try to put on the fete. This method of writing

is called parallel structure.

The play, which takes place in a marquee, has five characters: Mrs

Pearce, the councillor; who is doing a talk at the fete. Milly, who

helps organize the fete; Gosforth, who is responsible for the whole

fete; the vicar, who helps out, and finally Stewart, a scout, who is

Milly’s fiancé and is in charge of his boy scouts, the wolf cubs who

are meant to present a show at the fete. The play uses comedy as its

medium through intelligently placed sentences, irony and actions. The

play kicked off in comedy with the wolf cubs throwing stones at a

caravan, and then it set off from there, getting more explicit,

climaxing in them breaking a scaffolding a torturing a pig. The whole

‘concept’ of the play is ‘everything going wrong’; from the smallest

things like it raining to councillor Pearce getting electrocuted.

In this play many concerns are brought forward subtly, some serious,