Word: ayckbourn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Even in his own country, Ayckbourn has never received the critical respect accorded contemporaries like Tom Stoppard and David Hare. They write "important" plays about political issues or world-famous physicists or 19th century Russian philosophers. Ayckbourn's realm is smaller and more familiar - the domestic and romantic predicaments of modern, middle-class Brits. Yet no one has probed more acutely, or with a finer balance of laughter and pain, the sad human drama behind these tidy surfaces: the inability of people to connect, to see the casual cruelty they inflict on others, to come to terms with their failed...
That delicate mix of comedy and tragedy is something Ayckbourn hit upon almost from the beginning. "When I started in weekly rep, we did a different play every week," he says. "I became aware of a pattern that was evolving - we would do a comedy, then a thriller and then a serious play. With the comedy, all the lights came up to full. And everyone was very, very loud and terribly fast. And in the serious plays, it was positively dark, and everyone was talking very quietly. And I thought, I'd love to write a very, very slow comedy...
...Ayckbourn, 69, is explaining this in the sunny and spacious Scarborough house (actually three Georgian townhouses that he connected) where he lives with his second wife, former actress Heather Stoney. The effects of his stroke are visible. He walks unsteadily, and his left hand is fairly useless, reducing his two-finger typing method to just one. Yet his speech and mental acuity are undiminished. ("My head's working fine," he says - though "I still have a problem with a group of people, if they're all talking at once.") He laughs frequently, dives into anecdotes with an actor's relish...
...some trepidation about returning to writing. But once he plunged in (Life and Beth is his first post-stroke work), he found it came as easily as before. Ayckbourn writes quickly, typically barreling through a complete draft in 10 days. "My attitude with plays is they're like pictures, in a sense," he says. "You have to write them in the frame. If you stop in the middle of a picture, I imagine, leave it for several weeks and start again, you're going to get a lopsided composition. Some of my best writing comes from serendipity. [Unexpected] things drop...
...Ayckbourn, whose father played violin for the London Symphony Orchestra and whose mother wrote novels, was influenced in his early years less by theater than by the triple bills of American B-movies that he would spend long afternoons watching. Even today he seems aloof from most of his British playwriting peers; he's friends with few of them, and the only dramatist with whom he professes a close affinity (personal and professional) is Harold Pinter, who directed him in an early production of The Birthday Party. "I got fascinated by his use of dialogue, his use of words...