Alan Ayckbourn, the author of more than fifty plays, is possibly the most prolific dramatist in the history of the English theater, leaving Shakespeare himself—with his mere thirty-seven plays—in the dust. Put another way, since completing his first drama in 1959 at the age of twenty, Ayckbourn has written an average of five plays every four years, and generally written them under the most intense deadline pressures imaginable: beginning work sometimes less than a week before rehearsals are scheduled to start, he composes a full-length drama in a matter of days.
The reason for this last-minute mode of writing lies in Ayckbourn’s often-cited view of himself as a director rather than a playwright—a man of the theater rather than a man of literature. And that he is in a way that has become rare for English (or American) playwrights of the last 75 years. Thus, he is too busy running things — publicity, house management, casting, etc.—to bother himself with writing until the last possible moment.
Born in 1939 to a mother who was a writer and a father who was a conductor, Ayckbourn was brought up, following his parents’ divorce, in a home dominated by a not-much-loved stepfather who moved the family frequently to keep up with his job. Eventually Ayckbourn won a scholarship to what the British call a “public school”—but which we would call a private, or prep school. There he discovered theater, and decided to make it his career, initially intending to become an actor. At 18, on completing his “public school” studies—the English equivalent of high school—he entered immediately on his life in the professional theater, taking a succession of jobs as stage-manager and actor in regional companies, and ending up eventually at a theater in Scarborough—a coastal summer-holiday town in the north of England.
The director of this company, Stephen Joseph, an ambitious but somewhat eccentric theatrical personality, urged Ayckbourn to set his sights on writing rather than acting, and Ayckbourn complied, producing his first play, The Square Cat. Ever since—for the past forty-one years—Ayckbourn has been associated with the Scarborough theater as both playwright and director, becoming director of productions in 1970.
Most of his plays have been written for and premiered at the Scarborough theater before moving on to productions in London and, eventually, the rest of the world. This puts Ayckbourn directly in the tradition of Shakespeare and Moliere, who also had lifelong associations with one particular company for which they served as authors, directors, and often actors. They wrote their plays with their colleagues in mind, tailoring roles to the talents of specific performers. They also wrote for particular theatrical spaces—The Globe for Shakespeare, for example—and particular audiences, shaping their works to suit the physical circumstances of their production and the tastes of their spectators.
Particularly important in helping to determine the style and subject matter of Ayckbourn’s playwriting are the nature of the theatrical space in Scarborough and the preferences of its audience. The space is somewhat unusual for England—it is an arena stage, or theater-in-the-round, with spectators seated all around a central area where the actors perform. Among the advantages of arena staging to a small, regional theater such as Scarborough is the fact that it requires very little expensive scenery—which would only serve to block some group of spectators’ sightlines. And because there is little or no scenery pinning the action down to specific places, arena staging permits exceptionally fluid temporal and spatial movement. This has certainly permitted—perhaps even encouraged—Ayckbourn’s recurrent preoccupation with plots that travel about unconventionally in time and space.
As for Scarborough’s audience, it is generally composed of middle-class people on summer vacation looking for a night of fun in the theater. According to Ayckbourn, he has written plays that “would make people laugh when their seaside summer holidays were spoiled by the rain and they came into the theatre to get dry before trudging back to their landladies. . . . as worthwhile a reason for writing a play as any.” Thus Ayckbourn writes comedies, and generally sets them in the heart of bourgeois England, the so-called Home Counties—social territory roughly equivalent to the affluent suburbs of New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester County, and Long Island.
“The perfect play,” according to Ayckbourn, “is terribly funny and serious at the same time.” He cites as his major influences the Restoration dramatist, William Congreve, the Victorian bad-boy, Oscar Wilde, the jazz-age free-spirit, Noel Coward, and the French farceur, Feydeau. More surprising influences are Anton Chekhov, with his mingled tears and laughter, and Harold Pinter, whose ability to distort “the everyday phrase, slightly bending it” has contributed to his skewed vision of ordinary life.
He often focuses on the complications, difficulties, absurdities, and discomforts of marriage, perhaps a reflection of his own unconventional—and unhappy—experience of domestic life. Married at 19, he fathered two sons and then soon afterwards separated from his wife, Christine Allen. However, he never divorced her, and has remained in marital limbo for nearly forty years. This he blames on his own “inertia,” a problem that afflicts many of his characters. As for Mrs. Ayckbourn, she maintains that “she would be among the richest women in the world if she claimed royalties for all the fodder she has provided for his bitter, biting domestic comedies.”
Of his fifty-plus plays, the most well-known include How the Other Half Loves (1969), Absurd Person Singular (1972), The Norman Conquests (1973), Intimate Exchanges (1983), and Comic Potential (1998). Communicating Doors was first performed in 1994. He says he the idea for the play came to him when he was in a hotel room wondering what would happen if he walked through the door and found himself transported through time. He thought about this possibility for “the usual gestation period—nine months,” and then wrote the script in one week, a dumbfoundingly short span of time, considering the complications of the plot.
His plays have won numerous awards in England, including the Olivier Award and the Evening Standard Best Comedy Award.
The reason for this last-minute mode of writing lies in Ayckbourn’s often-cited view of himself as a director rather than a playwright—a man of the theater rather than a man of literature. And that he is in a way that has become rare for English (or American) playwrights of the last 75 years. Thus, he is too busy running things — publicity, house management, casting, etc.—to bother himself with writing until the last possible moment.
Born in 1939 to a mother who was a writer and a father who was a conductor, Ayckbourn was brought up, following his parents’ divorce, in a home dominated by a not-much-loved stepfather who moved the family frequently to keep up with his job. Eventually Ayckbourn won a scholarship to what the British call a “public school”—but which we would call a private, or prep school. There he discovered theater, and decided to make it his career, initially intending to become an actor. At 18, on completing his “public school” studies—the English equivalent of high school—he entered immediately on his life in the professional theater, taking a succession of jobs as stage-manager and actor in regional companies, and ending up eventually at a theater in Scarborough—a coastal summer-holiday town in the north of England.
The director of this company, Stephen Joseph, an ambitious but somewhat eccentric theatrical personality, urged Ayckbourn to set his sights on writing rather than acting, and Ayckbourn complied, producing his first play, The Square Cat. Ever since—for the past forty-one years—Ayckbourn has been associated with the Scarborough theater as both playwright and director, becoming director of productions in 1970.
Most of his plays have been written for and premiered at the Scarborough theater before moving on to productions in London and, eventually, the rest of the world. This puts Ayckbourn directly in the tradition of Shakespeare and Moliere, who also had lifelong associations with one particular company for which they served as authors, directors, and often actors. They wrote their plays with their colleagues in mind, tailoring roles to the talents of specific performers. They also wrote for particular theatrical spaces—The Globe for Shakespeare, for example—and particular audiences, shaping their works to suit the physical circumstances of their production and the tastes of their spectators.
Particularly important in helping to determine the style and subject matter of Ayckbourn’s playwriting are the nature of the theatrical space in Scarborough and the preferences of its audience. The space is somewhat unusual for England—it is an arena stage, or theater-in-the-round, with spectators seated all around a central area where the actors perform. Among the advantages of arena staging to a small, regional theater such as Scarborough is the fact that it requires very little expensive scenery—which would only serve to block some group of spectators’ sightlines. And because there is little or no scenery pinning the action down to specific places, arena staging permits exceptionally fluid temporal and spatial movement. This has certainly permitted—perhaps even encouraged—Ayckbourn’s recurrent preoccupation with plots that travel about unconventionally in time and space.
As for Scarborough’s audience, it is generally composed of middle-class people on summer vacation looking for a night of fun in the theater. According to Ayckbourn, he has written plays that “would make people laugh when their seaside summer holidays were spoiled by the rain and they came into the theatre to get dry before trudging back to their landladies. . . . as worthwhile a reason for writing a play as any.” Thus Ayckbourn writes comedies, and generally sets them in the heart of bourgeois England, the so-called Home Counties—social territory roughly equivalent to the affluent suburbs of New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester County, and Long Island.
“The perfect play,” according to Ayckbourn, “is terribly funny and serious at the same time.” He cites as his major influences the Restoration dramatist, William Congreve, the Victorian bad-boy, Oscar Wilde, the jazz-age free-spirit, Noel Coward, and the French farceur, Feydeau. More surprising influences are Anton Chekhov, with his mingled tears and laughter, and Harold Pinter, whose ability to distort “the everyday phrase, slightly bending it” has contributed to his skewed vision of ordinary life.
He often focuses on the complications, difficulties, absurdities, and discomforts of marriage, perhaps a reflection of his own unconventional—and unhappy—experience of domestic life. Married at 19, he fathered two sons and then soon afterwards separated from his wife, Christine Allen. However, he never divorced her, and has remained in marital limbo for nearly forty years. This he blames on his own “inertia,” a problem that afflicts many of his characters. As for Mrs. Ayckbourn, she maintains that “she would be among the richest women in the world if she claimed royalties for all the fodder she has provided for his bitter, biting domestic comedies.”
Of his fifty-plus plays, the most well-known include How the Other Half Loves (1969), Absurd Person Singular (1972), The Norman Conquests (1973), Intimate Exchanges (1983), and Comic Potential (1998). Communicating Doors was first performed in 1994. He says he the idea for the play came to him when he was in a hotel room wondering what would happen if he walked through the door and found himself transported through time. He thought about this possibility for “the usual gestation period—nine months,” and then wrote the script in one week, a dumbfoundingly short span of time, considering the complications of the plot.
His plays have won numerous awards in England, including the Olivier Award and the Evening Standard Best Comedy Award.