by Alan Ayckbourn Directed by Dorothy Bentote
Oct 9, 10 & 11, 2003
Graham |
Malcolm Bentote |
Anna, his wife |
Estelle Dunham |
Leonard, her brother |
Ritchard Tysoe |
Joan |
Emma Kimsey |
Peter, her fiance |
Mark Brown |
Programme Notes
[Photographs]
ALAN AYCKBOURN
Alan Ayckbourn is one of Britain's most commercially successful
playwrights, with regular West End and repertory productions.
Born in London in 1939, he left school at eighteen and started
his theatrical career as an actor and stage manager with Donald
Wolfit's Studio Theatre Company. In the early 1960s he moved
to Stephen Joseph's Studio Theatre Company, where he began directing
and writing with the encouragement of Joseph. His first big
success, Relatively Speaking, opened in London in 1967.
He has worked in theatre all his life as, variously, stage
manager, sound technician, lighting technician, scene painter,
prop maker, actor, writer and director. Most of these talents
he developed (or abandoned) thanks to his mentor, Stephen Joseph,
who first encouraged him to write. Almost all of the 60-plus
plays Alan Ayckbourn has written to date received their first
performance at this theatre. More than 30 have subsequently
been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre
or the RSC since his first hit, Relatively Speaking, opened
at the Duke Of York's Theatre in 1967.
Major successes include Absurd Person Singular, The
Norman Conquests, Bedroom Farce, Just Between
Ourselves, A Chorus Of Disapproval, Woman In Mind,
A Small Family Business, Man Of The Moment and
Things We Do For Love. His plays have won numerous awards
- including seven London Evening Standard Awards. They have
been translated into 35 languages and are performed on stage
and television throughout the world. They have also been filmed
in French and English. Seven of his plays have been seen on
Broadway attracting two Tony nominations. In 1991, he received
a Dramalogue Critics Award for his play Henceforward...
His plays now feature on the school curricula for study and
examination.
He is a superb theatrical craftsman and his plays are often
constructed around a tour de force of staging: The Norman
Conquests is a trilogy of plays each of which stands on
its own and presents the same events from the garden, sitting
room and dining room.
How The Other Half Loves, Absurd Person Singular
and Bedroom Farce each present more than one household
on stage simultaneously; Way Upstream required a river
boat on the stage of the National Theatre. House and Garden,
a 'double' play performed simultaneously in two auditoria, first
seen at Scarborough in 1999 was staged at the Royal National
Theatre in 2000. It played to packed houses in the Olivier and
Lyttelton auditoria. Productions have also been seen in the
Netherlands, Germany and the US.
His plays have their roots in the tradition of farce. He has,
however, stretched the boundaries of comedy and farce as his
work has developed; increasingly the comings and goings of married
couples are injected with a note of black comedy and social
groups have an undercurrent which suggests the darker side of
human interchange.
One reason for his success might be that his work challenges
his audience, but challenges them within well-defined limits.
The subject matter of many of his plays is middle class values
together with a lifestyle under threat - but not too much. His
characters remind us of people we know (never ourselves). The
comedy comes from being thankful that we have avoided being
involved with such people in such grotesque comic situations.
Ayckbourn makes his audience work by creating, in their imaginations,
off-stage worlds and characters who are jokes in themselves.
He has been the Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary
Theatre at Oxford University and is a fellow of the RSA. He
holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Keele, Hull,
Leeds, Bradford, York and the Open University and is an Honorary
Fellow of Bretton Hall and Cardiff University of Wales.
Other accolades include a Montblanc de la Culture Award for
Europe for 'establishing a thriving theatrical tradition in
Scarborough and for his dedication and commitment to it'; a
Writer's Guild of Great Britain Lifetime Achievement Award and
a Sunday Times Award for Literary Achievement.
He was appointed a CBE in 1987 and in 1997 was knighted for
his services to theatre. Alan Ayckbourn would perhaps regard
his greatest achievement to be the establishment of a permanent
home for the company of which he has been Artistic Director
since 1971 - the Stephen Joseph Theatre. Six years of fundraising
and hard work culminated in the opening on 30th April 1996 of
a splendid two-auditor complex. Fashioned from a former Odeon
cinema, it stands in the centre of Scarborough and is the realisation
of a 40-year dream.
He is also an established director not only of his own work
but other peoples. He says of himself that he is a director
who writes rather than a writer who directs. He received an
award for his direction of the National Theatre production of
A View From A Bridge by Arthur Miller. His production
of Conversations With My Father transferred to the Old
Vic from Scarborough.
Ayckbourn's plays are known throughout the world - he even
has a street named after him on Broadway. He was appointed a
CBE in 1987 and holds a number of honorary degrees. During 1992
he was the Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre
at St Catherine's College, Oxford.
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