These lines from Way Upstream (1981) point to a change of direction for Ayckbourn. The play describes the holiday cruise of a collection of friends who have hired a boat ‘because', says Ayckbourn, ‘a vast proportion of Britons are stupid enough to believe they come from a seafaring race’ and surprisingly often ‘go out on the Broads and ram each other'. We shall start at Pendon, the location for most of Ayckbourn's plays. This is his universal middle England; somewhere lying perhaps in Berkshire, a ‘non-town', its chance of an individual personality swamped by too close a proximity to London but affording a prosperous middle-class comfort for most of its residents. It is his natural dramatic milieu, the ideal place to bring the lives and loves of theatre's middle-class audiences under the microscope. But we are warned clearly enough in the scene list that this play involves no ordinary location. The action is set on the River Orb, aboard the cabin cruiser Hadforth Bounty. We shall journey into Gessing Lock, pass through Stumble Lock, before ducking under Armageddon Bridge and emerging with an optimistic sense of freedom at the head of the river.

The voyage from realism to allegory was a daring departure for the playwright who had by 1981 established his credentials as a keen observer of the battlefields of marriage and small-town morality. But Way Upstream suffered at the hands of critics at the time of production, who generally saw it as technically overdemanding and morally ambivalent. Perhaps the most damaging of remarks came from a loyal and acute observer of the Scarborough output, Robin Thornber. Writing in his Guardian review, he observed that ‘philosophically, it's a plug for the soggy centrism of the Social Democratic Party'. It was a recognition that Ayckbourn had moved into new territory, that his purpose was larger than mere observation of domestic frailty. But, though at the time Thornber's remark linking this foray to political movements seemed apt and relevant, it was essentially a misunderstanding of the intent behind the allegory.