Word: ayckbourn
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...days, Alan Ayckbourn's work used to wind up on Broadway: early, funny plays like How the Other Half Loves, Absurd Person Singular, and The Norman Conquests trilogy. More recently, several of Ayckbourn's later plays (Comic Potential, Private Fears in Public Places) and more flamboyant experiments (Intimate Exchanges, the play with 16 permutations) have been given major New York productions. In between, however, lies a vast expanse of Ayckbourn masterpieces that have rarely if ever been seen in the U.S. (Read TIME's report: "Alan Ayckbourn: Man of the Moment...
...quick guide to 10 Ayckbourn plays that deserve more attention...
...this American fan, following Ayckbourn over the years has been a cycle of hope and frustration. First there's the trip to London to see each new Ayckbourn play, gems like Joking Apart (1978), in which a "golden couple" inadvertently destroy the lives of all who come in contact with them, and Man of the Moment (1988), his acidic satire of a former criminal turned media star - so prescient about the distorting mirror of reality TV - and Wildest Dreams (1991), his chilling black comedy about addicts of a Dungeons & Dragons - style fantasy game who lose touch with real life. Then...
Even in his own country, Ayckbourn has never gotten the critical respect accorded contemporaries such as Tom Stoppard and David Hare. They write "important" plays about political issues or nuclear physics or Russian intellectuals. Ayckbourn's realm is more familiar: the domestic and romantic trials of modern middle-class Brits. Yet no one has probed more acutely, or with a finer balance of laughter and pain, the sad human comedy 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 illusions, to be happy...
...Ayckbourn, 70, who is still going strong from his home base in Scarborough, England, despite suffering a stroke three years ago, looks with bemusement at the trouble Americans have staging his delicate mix of comedy and tragedy. "It looks pretty easy," he says, "but it sure as hell isn't. You've only got to tune it too far one way or the other." The new Norman Conquests is pitch-perfect. Can't anyone in America pick up the tune...