Ayckbourn, Alan (1939- ) playwright, director

Alan Ayckbourn is the only son of Horace Ayckbourn, a former first violinist of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Irene Maud Worley, a writer of romances. His mother divorced his father when Alan was five and then contracted a second failed marriage. It is probable these broken marriages contributed, along with Ayckbourn’s own first unsuccessful marriage at an early age, to the critical portrayal of marriage in his plays, which show increasing disillusionment with the institution.

Ayckbourn’s grandparents were music-hall performers, and early in his own career, he alternated acting with stage direction. He toured with Donald Wolfit’s repertory company, but his most important career move was joining the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, Yorkshire, in 1959. Stephen Joseph, son of actress Hermione Gingold, encouraged Ayckbourn to write for the stage. On Joseph’s death in the late 1960s, Ayckbourn returned to Scarborough as a theatrical director after a few years producing radio drama for the BBC in Leeds.

Ayckbourn became a prolific and successful writer of sharp, sometimes bittersweet comedies about British middle-class and suburban manners and mores. The Stephen Joseph Theatre serves as an ideal proving ground for his plays. Ayckbourn writes “team” dramas for performance by a known troupe of actors for a familiar audience in an intimate setting. Since the early 1970s, his pattern has been to write a play for summer production in Scarborough, followed by a season in London a year later.

Ayckbourn’s first few plays, written under the pseudonym Roland Allen, have not been published. His first published play, Standing Room Only (1961) is about overpopulation resulting from a monumental traffic jam. Relatively Speaking (1967) established Ayckbourn as a presence on the London stage. Modeled on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the play substitutes Ayckbourn’s own brand of jokes for Wildean wit and epigram.

In Ayckbourn’s plays, setting is as important as character. Relatively Speaking shows his ingenuity in staging by simultaneously presenting two juxtaposed households. More elaborate staging is deployed in How the Other Half Loves (1971), in which an upper-class household is superimposed upon a lower-middle-class one. The audience is able to distinguish the Fosters’ tasteful abode from the Phillips’ cluttered nest through color and style contrasts. Ayckbourn’s sense of timing and sequence are impeccable. The handling of time in this play is unusual, as events do not occur in chronological order. Critic Albert Kalson calls this play, which made Ayckbourn’s name on Broadway, one of the playwright’s “most felicitous concoctions.”

Absurd Person Singular (1973) follows the antics of three couples (upper-, middle-, and lower-class) who join one another in a series of Christmas reunions, each act taking place in one of the couples’ kitchens. The play, in which the battle of the sexes is enhanced by class warfare, won the Evening Standard Award for the year’s best comedy.

Ayckbourn’s most popular drama is his trilogy The Norman Conquests (1974), which he called his first “offstage action play.” The three dramas it comprises—Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden—take place during a single weekend in different parts of the same country house. Action and conversation that take place “off” in one play are picked up in another. The three interlinked dramas were intended to be presented on three successive days, like the action itself. However, each play is self-contained so they may be viewed in any order.

The success of The Norman Conquests is due largely to the in-depth development of its characters. Norman, a scruffy librarian, is a compulsive philanderer, manipulator, and narcissist. Married to practical Ruth, Norman plans to take his sister-in-law, Annie, away for a weekend of illicit passion. (Unmarried Annie could use a break, as her life has been sacrificed to looking after her bedridden mother.) Reg, Ruth’s brother, and his wife, Sarah, come to relieve Annie. However, they are not “in the know,” believing that she will be weekending with her dithering old flame, Tom. When she discovers Annie’s secret, Sarah resolves to overthrow the lovers’ plans, until Norman propositions her as well. At this point Norman’s wife returns, intent on retrieving her husband.

The winner of numerous awards, The Norman Conquests marked a new mood in Ayckbourn comedy—more bitter and astringent and with more rounded characters than those of his 1960s comedies. The mood of Ayckbourn’s comedy has darkened even further since the mid-1980s.

In Sisterly Feelings (1981) Ayckbourn explores alternative endings and different permutations and combinations of plot, depending on a coin toss in the second scene. After his wife’s burial, Ralph Matthews takes his daughters, Abigail and Dorcas, to the park where he first proposed to his wife. Both girls are unhappily married; both are attracted to young Simon Grimshaw. They toss a coin to see who will walk back to town with him, and the winner of the toss will have an affair with him. After that, each woman must decide what to do, but in the end each returns to her unsatisfactory spouse in the play’s unvarying final act. Though the playwright sets out to explore how chance and choice affect our lives, the play’s ultimate effect is deterministic.

Ayckbourn’s drama combines conventional subject matter with experimental stage techniques in the handling of time and space. Some find a disproportion of manner to matter in his plays. On the other hand, his work shows continuous experimentation and increasing skill, particularly in character development, as well as the ability to distill the essence of what is universally funny in relations between British suburbanites. It seems likely that, of his many plays, some of those discussed here will survive for years to come.

Works about Alan Ayckbourn:
- Billington, Michael. Alan Ayckbourn. New York: Grove Press, 1984.
- Dukore, Bernard F. Alan Ayckbourn: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1991.
- Page, Malcolm, ed. File on Ayckbourn. London: Methuen, 1989.