Word: ayckbourn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...called Hughes "the Steven Spielberg of youth comedy." Well, his movies were popular, with big grosses on spare budgets, but it's better to find literary analogues. In his facility for spinning the fullest comedy out of the frailest situation, he was the movies' version of playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The stay-at-home dad morphed into Mr. Mom; the annoying guy next to you became the Steve Martin-John Candy hit Planes, Trains and Automobiles. And as a portraitist of teen angst, he was a sunnier Salinger, a comedic S.E. Hinton. Anyway, Hughes was just what Hollywood needed and rarely...
...Henceforward (1985) Ayckbourn's futuristic blend of A Clockwork Orange and Amadeus: In a blighted future, with gang wars raging outside, a reclusive composer buys a female robot to keep him company, while he struggles to compose his masterpiece. The thrilling 1989 London production (originally starring Iam McKellan) would be hard to duplicate - but someone should...
...woman meet on London's Albert Bridge and plot to "exchange" murders. She goes after his hated boss, then expects him to bump off her rival in love. This epic updating of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train is hampered by its two-play length, but it is Ayckbourn at the very top of his game...
...Wildest Dreams (1991) A group of friends gather regularly to play a Dungeons and Dragons-style roleplaying game, which gradually takes over their lives. One of Ayckbourn's darkest plays - one character regresses to infancy before our eyes - unjustly neglected since its 1993 London premiere at the Royal Shakespeare Company...
...Time of My Life (1992) One of Ayckbourn's most complex experiments with time: A family celebration at a restaurant becomes a three-part fugue: one couple is followed in real time for the next two hours; another's story moves forward two years; a third moves backward in time for two months. I've never seen it staged (though Chicago's Steppenwolf gave it a try some years back), but it reads like a dream...