Alan Ayckbourn

Alan Ayckbourn, born in 1939, British playwright, actor, and theater director, best known for his farcical dramas about the British middle class. Ayckbourn was born in Hampstead, England, and was educated from 1952 to 1957 at the Haileybury and Imperial Service College in Hertfordshire, England. He began his theatrical career as an actor working in repertory at Edinburgh, Scotland; Worthing, England; and Oxford, England. He was a founding member of the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, in 1962 and, after several years in Leeds as a British Broadcasting Company (BBC) radio drama producer (1964-1970), he became director of productions of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round in Scarborough, England.

Ayckbourn’s first stage success came with Relatively Speaking (1967; televised 1990), and since then his plays have all eventually been staged in London, a mark of their popularity. Ayckbourn’s other successful plays include How the Other Half Loves (1969), Absurd Person Singular (1973; televised, 1985), The Norman Conquests (1974; televised, 1977), Absent Friends (1975; televised, 1985), A Chorus of Disapproval (1985; motion-picture version, 1989), Man of the Moment (1990), The Revengers’ Comedies (1991), and Time of My Life (1993). Later plays include Things We Do for Love (1997), Virtual Reality (2000), and Game Plan (2002).

Ayckbourn’s plays are often noted for their interesting use of theatrical sets, as in The Norman Conquests, a trilogy of plays that show, respectively, simultaneous events in the dining room, living room, and garden of the same house during one weekend. The plays House (1999) and Garden (1999) take place on a single day and were designed to be performed simultaneously, by the same cast, in adjacent theaters. As Ayckbourn’s writing has matured, the themes of his plays have become more serious and the farce has become darker. He was made Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1987 and knighted in 1997.