Ayckbourn, Alan

Ayckbourn, Alan (1939– ), English playwright and director, who in 1970 was appointed director of productions at Scarborough (see STEPHEN JOSEPH THEATRE IN THE ROUND). Most of his plays were written for this company and then transferred to London, where the first to be outstandingly successful was Relatively Speaking (1967). This was followed by How the Other Half Loves (London, 1970; NY, 1971) and Time and Time Again (1972). Absurd Person Singular (1973; NY, 1974) depicts three couples on three successive Christmas Eves, each act being set in the kitchen of one of them. Ayckbourn's next work, The Norman Conquests (1974; NY, 1975), was a trilogy of full-length plays, Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden, showing simultaneous events in the dining-room, living-room, and garden of the same house during the same week-end. A musical, Jeeves (1975), based on P. G. Wodehouse, for which Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the music, was not a success, but in the same year Absent Friends had a long run. In Bedroom Farce (National Theatre, 1977; NY, 1979), the action passes between the bedrooms of three married couples, which form a multiple setting. Just between Ourselves (also 1977) and Joking Apart (1979) were more serious and had comparatively short runs. In Sisterly Feelings (NT, 1980) the middle two of the four scenes have alternative versions. Taking Steps and Season's Greetings, about a family reunion at Christmas, were also seen in London in 1980.

Ayckbourn's plays of the 1980s, while still described as comedies, are more persistently disturbing. In Way Upstream (NT, 1982) a boating holiday turns into a nightmare; in Woman in Mind (1986; NY, 1988), the leading character (embedded, like so many Ayckbourn women, in a profoundly unsatisfactory marriage) goes out of her mind; A Small Family Business (NT, 1987) takes a sharp look at business morality; and Henceforward … (1988) envisages a robotized future. A Chorus of Disapproval, however, centring on an amateur production of Gay's The Beggar's Opera (NT, 1985), provides comparatively unclouded pleasure, as does Man of the Moment (1990), about a television encounter between a reformed robber and a man who once tried to intercept him. Ayckbourn depicts with humour, accuracy, and an occasional note of cruelty the sexual and other stresses of English middle-class life, and his plays are ingeniously constructed. They have been performed all over the world, and at one time five of them were running in London simultaneously.