Word: ayckbourn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Three years ago British Playwright Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests came to Broadway and failed to conquer. Though a huge critical and commercial hit in London, this comic trilogy barely limped through a six-month New York City run. It was not difficult to figure out what had gone wrong: unlike such other recent imports as Peter Shaffer's Equus and Simon Gray's Otherwise Engaged, The Norman Conquests had been given an indifferent production. Miscast American actors clobbered the wit out of Ayckbourn's words. Now, through PBS's Great Performances series, The Norman Conquests has a second...
...characteristic Ayckbourn manner, the trilogy is built around an ingenious gimmick. Each of the plays tells of the same six characters in the same country house during the same long weekend; indeed, all three plays take place concurrently and tell the exact same story. What makes each one different is its vantage point. The first play, Table Manners, unfolds in the house's dining room; the second, Living Together, is set in the living room; the third takes the characters Round and Round the Garden. Though each play can stand on its own, the trilogy forms an enormous jigsaw puzzle...
ABSENT FRIENDS by ALAN AYCKBOURN...
...playwright than to be obsessed. With Eugene O'Neill, it is the isolated torment of the soul's loneliness. With Arthur Miller, it is the nagging quest for justice. With Tennessee Williams, it is the poignant cry of the violated heart. And though Britain's Alan Ayckbourn does not rank with these playwrights, he, too, has his ambient obsession. Again and again (Absurd Person Singular, The Norman Conquests and now Absent Friends) he dwells on the crimping horizons and absurdist conventional fritter of suburban life...
...Ayckbourn can spot the shifting pressures of money and status with a barometric eye. His ear has perfect pitch for the recycled banalities that pass for conversation and the kind of gossip that stirs marital tempests in provincial teapots. Rarely have Ayckbourn's intelligence, nimble comic flair and sympathetic imagination been more acutely on display than in Absent Friends, which gets a rousingly animated U.S. premiere at Washington's Kennedy Center...