Word: scarborough
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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...
...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 at the end of this year, to concentrate on writing and directing his own work...
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...
...politics: "I've lived through enough times to know, as the French say, plus ça change - nothing changes, give or take the odd Iraqi war." One thing that musters his outrage, though, is the dwindling government funding for the arts, which has endangered local theaters like his Scarborough company - where, in all his years as artistic director, he has never taken a salary. "My salary is in the accounts," he says, "but it usually goes flying out to pay for some damn trapdoor or something...
...says. "It's not just a matter of making them laugh. It's giving them a reason to want to stay in the theater." He's been able to keep them in the theater with less apparent effort than almost anyone writing today. And even if the folks in Scarborough may see a little less of him, he doesn't plan on stopping any time soon...