Alan Ayckbourn

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE (born 12 April 1939) is a popular and prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-two full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967.

Major successes include Absurd Person Singular (1975), The Norman Conquests trilogy (1973), Bedroom Farce (1975), Just Between Ourselves (1976), A Chorus of Disapproval (1984), Woman in Mind (1985), A Small Family Business (1987), Man Of The Moment (1988), House & Garden (1999) and Private Fears in Public Places (2004). His plays have won numerous awards, including seven London Evening Standard Awards. They have been translated into over 35 languages and are performed on stage and television throughout the world. Ten of his plays have been staged on Broadway, attracting two Tony nominations, and one Tony award.

[edit] Life

[edit] Childhood

Ayckbourn was born in Hampstead, London.^[1][2] His mother Irene Worley ("Lolly") was a writer of short stories who published under the name "Mary James".^[3] His father, Horace Ayckbourn, was an orchestral violinist, at one time deputy leader of the London Symphony Orchestra^[4]. His parents, who separated shortly after World War II, never married, and Ayckbourn's mother divorced her first husband to marry again in 1948.^[1][5]

Ayckbourn wrote his first play at Wisborough Lodge preparatory school when he was about 10.^[6] While at prep school as a boarder his mother wrote to tell him she was marrying Cecil Pye, a bank manager, and when he was at home for the holidays his new family consisted of his mother, his stepfather and Christopher, his stepfather's son by an earlier marriage. This relationship too, reportedly ran into difficulties early on.^[7] Biographer Paul Allen has compared characters and themes in Ayckbourn's mature plays with his childhood experience of several unconventional relationships and an unhappy marriage.^{[8][dubious – discuss]}

Ayckbourn attended Haileybury, and while there toured Europe and America with the school's Shakespeare company.^[2][9]

[edit] Adult life

After leaving school at 17, Ayckbourn's career took several temporary jobs in various places before starting a temporary job at the Scarborough Library Theatre, where he was introduced to the artistic director, Stephen Joesph^[2][10] (1921-67). It is said that Joseph became both a mentor and father figure for Ayckbourn,^[11] and he has consistently spoken highly of him.^[12]

Ayckbourn's career was briefly interrupted when he was called for National Service. He was swiftly discharged, officially on medical grounds, but it is suggested that a doctor who noticed his reluctance to join the Armed Forces deliberately failed the medical as a favour.^[13] Although Ayckbourn continued to move where his career took him, he settled in Scarborough, eventually buying Longwestgate House, the house formerly owned by Stephen Joseph.^[14]

In 1957, Ayckbourn married Christine Roland, another member of the Library Theatre company,^[15][16][17] and indeed Ayckbourn's first two plays were written jointly with her under the pseudonym of "Roland Allen".^[18] They had two sons, Steven and Philip.^[19] However, the marriage had difficulties which eventually led to their separation in 1971. Alan Ayckbourn said that his relationship with Christine became easy once they agreed their marriage was over. Around this time, he started to share a home with Heather Stoney,^[20] an actress he had first met ten years earlier.^[21] Like his mother, neither he nor Christine sought a divorce for the next thirty years and it was only in 1997 that they formally divorced; Ayckbourn married Heather Stoney.^[15][22] One side-effect of the timing is that, as Alan was awarded a knighthood a few months before the divorce,^[23] both his first and second wife are entitled to take the title of Lady Ayckbourn.

[edit] Influence on plays

Since Alan Ayckbourn's plays started becoming established in the West End, interviewers have raised the question of whether his work is autobiographical.^[24] There is no clear answer to this question. There has only been one biography, written by Paul Allen, and this primarily covers his career in the theatre.^[5] Ayckbourn has frequently said he sees aspects of himself in all his characters. For example, in Bedroom Farce (1975), he admitted to being, in some respects, all four of the men in the play.^[25] It has been suggested that, after Ayckbourn himself, the person who is used the most in his plays is his mother, particularly as Susan in Woman in Mind^[26] (1985).

What is less clear is how much influence events in Ayckbourn's life have had on his writing. It is true that the theme of marriages in various difficulties was heavily present throughout his plays in the early seventies, around the time his own marriage was coming to an end. However, by this time, he had also witnessed the failures of his parents' relationships as well as those of some of his friends.^[24] Which relationships, if any, he drew on for his plays, is unclear. In Paul Allen’s biography, Ayckbourn is briefly compared to Dafydd and Guy in A Chorus of Disapproval (1984). Both characters feel themselves in trouble, and there was speculation that Alan Ayckbourn himself may have felt himself to be in trouble. At the time, he had reportedly become seriously involved with another actress, which threatened his relationship with Heather Stoney.^[27] But again, it is unclear whether this had any effect on the writing, and Paul Allen's view is that it is not current experience that Ayckbourn uses for his plays.

It could be that Ayckbourn had written plays with himself and his own issues in mind, but as Ayckbourn is portrayed as a guarded and private man,^[5] it is hard to imagine him exposing his own life in his plays to any great degree. In the biography, Paul Allen wrote, regarding a suggestion in Cosmopolitan that his plays were becoming autobiographical: "If we take that to mean that his plays tell his own life story, he still hasn't started."^[24]

[edit] Career

[edit] Early career and acting

On leaving school his theatrical career started immediately, with an introduction to Sir Donald Wolfit by his French master.^[28] Ayckbourn joined Wolfit on tour to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as an acting assistant stage manager (meaning a role that involved both acting and stage management) for three weeks.^[2][29], with his first role on the professional stage being various parts in The Strong are Lonely by Fritz Hochwälder.^[30] In the following year, Ayckbourn appeared in six other plays at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing, ^[2][31] and the Thorndyke theatre, Leatherhead.^[2][32]

In 1957, Ayckbourn was employed by the director Stephen Joseph at the Library Theatre, Scarborough, the predecessor to the modern Stephen Joseph Theatre.^[2][10] His role, again, was initially an acting stage manager.^[2][10] This employment led to Ayckbourn's first professional script commission, in 1958. When he complained about the quality of a script he was performing, Joseph challenged him to write a better one. The result was The Square Cat, written under the pseudonym Roland Allen and first performed in 1959.^[33] In this play, Ayckbourn himself played the character Jerry Watiss.^[30]

After thirty-four appearances in plays at the Library Theatre, including four of his own, in 1962 Ayckbourn moved to Stoke-on-Trent to help set up the Victoria Theatre, (now the New Vic)^[34], where he appeared in a further eighteen plays.^[30] His final appearance in one of his own plays was as the Crimson Gollywog in the disastrous children's play Christmas v Mastermind.^[35]. He left the Stoke company in 1964, officially to commit his time to the London production of Mr. Whatnot (the first Ayckbourn play he was sufficiently happy with to allow to be performed today), but reportedly because was having trouble working with the artistic director, Peter Cheeseman.^[36]. By now, his career as a writer and director was coming to fruition, and his acting career was sidelined.

His final role on stage was as Jerry in Two for the Seesaw by William Gibson, at the Civic Theatre in Rotherham.^[30] He was left stranded on stage because Heather Stoney was unable to re-appear because the props had been left unpacked, and this led him to decide acting was more trouble than it was worth.^[37] The assistant stage manager on the production, Bill Kenwright, would become one of the UK's most successful producers.

[edit] Writing

Alan Ayckbourn's earliest plays were written and produced at a time when the Scarborough Library theatre, like most regional theatres, regularly commissioned work from their own actors to keep costs down^{[citation needed]} (the other notable actor whose work was being commissioned being David Campton)^[38]. His first play, The Square Cat, was sufficiently popular locally to secure further commissions, but neither this nor the following three plays had any major impact outside of Scarborough.^[39] But, after his transfer to New Vic in Stoke-on-Trent, there came Christmas v Mastermind, which flopped and is now universally regarded as Ayckbourn's greatest disaster.^[40][41]

His fortunes began to revive in 1963 with Mr. Whatnot, again premièring at the Victoria Theatre. This was the first play that Ayckbourn was sufficiently happy with to allow performances today, and the first play to receive a West End performance. However, the West End production flopped, in part down to misguided casting.^[42][43] After this, Ayckbourn experimented by collaborating with comedians, first writing a monologue for Tommy Cooper, and later with Ronnie Barker, who played Lord Slingsby-Craddock in the London production of Mr Whatnot in 1964, for the scripts of for LWT's Hark at Barker. Ayckbourn used the pseudonym 'Peter Caulfield' because he was under exclusive contract to the BBC at the time.^[44]

Then, in 1965, back at the Scarborough Library Theatre, Meet my Father was produced, later retitled Relatively Speaking. This time, the play was a massive success, both in Scarborough and the West End, making Alan Ayckbourn rich and earning him a congratulatory telegram from Noel Coward.^[45][46] This was not quite the end of Ayckbourn's hit-and-miss record, because his following play, The Sparrow only ran for three weeks at Scarborough. ^[47][48] However, the following play, How the Other Half Loves, secured his runaway success as a playwright. ^[49][50]

The height of Ayckbourn's commercial success included Absurd Person Singular (1975), The Norman Conquests trilogy (1973), Bedroom Farce (1975) and Just Between Ourselves (1976), all plays that focused heavily on marriage in the British middle classes. The only failure during this period was 1975 musical with Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Jeeves, and even this did little to dent Ayckbourn's popularity.^[51][52] Although his plays have received major West End productions almost from the beginning of his writing career, and hence have been reviewed in British newspapers, Ayckbourn's work was for years routinely dismissed as being too slight for serious study.^{[citation needed]} Recently, scholars have begun to view Ayckbourn as an important commentator on the lifestyles of the British suburban middle class, and as a stylistic innovator who experiments with theatrical styles within the boundaries set by popular tastes.^{[citation needed]}

From the 1980s, Ayckbourn began to move away from the recurring themes of marriage and explore more contemporary themes, one of the most famous and ground-breaking examples being Woman in Mind, a play performed entirely from the perspective of a Woman going through a nervous breakdown.^[53][54] He also experimented with several more unconventional ways of writing plays, such as Intimate Exchanges, which has one beginning and sixteen possible endings, and House & Garden, where two plays take place simultaneously of two different stages, as well as diversifying into children's theatre (such as Mr. A's Amazing Maze Plays and musical plays, such as By Jeeves (a more successful rewrite of the original Jeeves).

With a résumé of over seventy plays, of which more than forty have played at the National Theatre or in the West End, Alan Ayckbourn remains one of England’s most successful living playwrights. Despite his success, honours and awards (which include a prestigious Laurence Olivier Award), Alan Ayckbourn remains a relatively anonymous figure dedicated to regional theatre.^[55] Throughout his writing career, all but four of his plays were premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough in its three different locations.^[2]

Alan Ayckbourn received the CBE in 1987^[2][56] and was knighted in 1997^[2][23].

Although Alan Ayckbourn's plays no longer dominate the theatrical scene on the scale of his earlier works, he continues to write, his most recent major success being Private Fears in Public Places that had a hugely successful Off-Broadway run, and in 2006 was made into a film Cœurs, directed by Alain Resnais.^[57] Ayckbourn continues to write for the Stephen Joseph Theatre on invitation of his successor as Artistic Director, Chris Monks, with a new play expected for the 2009 autumn season.^[58]

[edit] Directing

Alan Ayckbourn began directing at the Scarborough Library Theatre in 1961, with a production of Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton. At first, this career was separate from his writing career. It was not until 1963 that Ayckbourn directed a play of his own (Standing Room Only),^[59] and 1977 that he was able to direct a play of his own in the West End (Bedroom Farce).^[60]

Since then Ayckbourn continued to work as a director, both of his own plays and those of other writers. In 1987 he directed four works in each of the auditoria of the Royal National Theatre, using a stock company for all four plays which included established performers like Michael Gambon, Polly Adams and Simon Cadell. Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge was performed in the Cottesloe, the farce Tons of Money by Will Evans and Valentine (with adaptations by Ayckbourn) was performed in the Lyttelton, Jacobean playwright John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore was performed in the Olivier and his own A Small Family Business was also performed there. Ayckbourn later directed Gambon in a season at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough that included Othello and a revival of his own Taking Steps.

He announced in 1999 that he would step back from directing other playwrights' work to concentrate on his own plays; the exception being in 2002 when he directed the world première of Tim Firth's The Safari Party - this is the only non-Ayckbourn play he has directed since Rob Shearman's Knights in Plastic Armour in 1999.

In February 2006, he suffered a stroke, and states on his website that "I am making a good recovery from my recent stroke. I received an overwhelming number of get-well cards and good wishes. I was extremely touched by the love and concern shown by so many friends, acquaintances and occasionally complete strangers", adding "Rest assured I'll be back." In September 2006 he returned to work and premièred his 70th play If I Were You at the Stephen Joseph Theatre on 17 October 2006.

He announced on 1 June 2007 that he would retire as artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 2008. (The actual handover date to the new Artistic Director, Chris Monks, is 31 March 2009),^[61] but would continue to direct premières and revivals of his work at the theatre.

[edit] C.V.

1956: Acting assistant stage manager with Donald Wolfit's company for three weeks at Edinburgh Festival. 1956 - 1957: Actor at Worthing, Leatherhead, Scarborough (see below), and Oxford

[edit] Honours and awards

• 1973: Evening Standard Award, Best Comedy, for Absurd Person Singular
• 1974: Evening Standard Award, Best Play, for The Norman Conquests
• 1977: Evening Standard Award, Best Play, for Just Between Ourselves
• 1981: Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (Litt. D.) from University of Hull
• 1985: Evening Standard Award, Best Comedy, for A Chorus of Disapproval
• 1985: Laurence Olivier Award, Best Comedy, for A Chorus of Disapproval
• 1987: Evening Standard Award, Best Play, for A Small Family Business
• 1987: Plays and Players Award
• 1987: Honorary degree of (Litt. D.) from Keele University
• 1987: Honorary degree of (Litt. D.) from University of Leeds
• 1987: Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
• 1989: Evening Standard Award, Best Comedy, for Henceforward...
• 1990: Evening Standard Award, Best Comedy, for Man of the Moment
• 1997: Knight Bachelor
• 1998: Honorary Degree (Doctor of the University) from Open University
• 2009: Laurence Olivier Special Award

[edit] Works

[edit] Full-length plays

To date, Alan Ayckbourn has written 72 full-length plays.^[62][63]

[edit] One-act plays

There are seven one-act plays written by Alan Ayckbourn. Five of them (Mother Figure, Drinking Companion, Between Mouthfuls, Gosforth’s Fete and A Talk in the Park) were written for Confusions, first performed in 1974.

The other two one-act plays were:

• Countdown, first performed in 1962, most well-known as part of Mixed Doubles, a set of short one-act plays and monologues contributed by nine different authors.
• A Cut in the Rates, performed at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 1984, and filmed for a BBC documentary.

[edit] Books

• Ayckbourn, Alan (2003). The Crafty Art of Playmaking. USA: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-6229-4. 
• Ayckbourn, Alan (2004). The Crafty Art of Playmaking. UK: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-21510-6. 

[edit] Film adaptations of Ayckbourn plays

Plays adapted as films include:

• A Chorus of Disapproval, directed by Michael Winner;
• Intimate Exchanges filmed as Smoking/No Smoking in 1993 by director Alain Resnais, featuring Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma;
• Private Fears in Public Places filmed as Cœurs also by Alain Resnais in 2006.

[edit] References

Allen, Paul (2001). Alan Ayckbourn: Grinning at the Edge. Methuen. p. 9. ISBN 0-413-73120-0. 

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Alan Ayckbourn

• The official Alan Ayckbourn website
• Alan Ayckbourn at the Internet Movie Database
• Alan Ayckbourn at the Internet Broadway Database
• Alan Ayckbourn at Contemporary Writers