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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.