Word: ayckbourn
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...Scarborough, everyone knows who Alan is. Playwright Alan Ayckbourn was an 18-year-old actor when he first came to this resort town on the coast of North Yorkshire, England, in the 1950s and joined a theater company run by Stephen Joseph, Britain's pioneer of theater-in-the-round. After starting to write his own plays, then working as a radio-drama producer for the bbc, Ayckbourn returned to Scarborough, where in 1972 he became artistic director and chief playwright-in-residence for what is now called the Stephen Joseph Theatre. It is there that nearly...
That, at least, was the pattern until a few years ago, when Ayckbourn's run of hits grew spotty, and he had a fight with the London producers of his 2002 trilogy Damsels in Distress. (He wanted the plays to be staged in repertory, but after mixed reviews, the producers dropped most performances of the two weaker shows.) Then, in February 2006, Ayckbourn's machine-like productivity was interrupted by a serious stroke. He was back to directing within several months, but in June 2007 he announced that he would step down as artistic director of his Scarborough theater...
...getting a big send-off. Over the summer, the Stephen Joseph Theatre showcased three of Ayckbourn's supernatural plays: revivals of the spooky Haunting Julia and Snake in the Grass, and the world premiere of the more comic Life and Beth. Following them this month is a revival of his 1985 tragicomedy Woman in Mind, and, in December, the premiere of his new musical, Awaking Beauty. Meanwhile, the Old Vic theater is welcoming Ayckbourn back to London with a revival of his most celebrated work, The Norman Conquests: his 1973 trilogy about a traumatic family weekend, with each play covering...
...which, one hopes, will spark a fresh reappraisal of the work of the most misunderstood, and very likely best, playwright currently writing in English. That is far from a widespread view. In America, Ayckbourn is still typecast, anachronistically, as a lightweight boulevard farceur (the "British Neil Simon"), or simply as a clever deviser of staging gimmicks: plays that squeeze the action in several rooms into one space, or move backward in time, or fill up the stage with water, or (in his insanely ambitious Intimate Exchanges) have no fewer than 16 dramatic permutations, depending on which alternative action the characters...
...Something similar might be said of the more aspiring Private Fears in Public Places, an unlikely adaptation by Alain Resnais, once the master of such high art revels as Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour, of a play by Alan Ayckbourn, a farceur who has always loved, sometimes to excess, the intricate braiding of characters and story lines. Everything in this movie seems to have been made on a soundstage and, for reasons best known to the director, his Paris is caught in a perpetual blizzard; it goes on for the several days consumed by the plot...