Word: theaterful
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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...
...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 the same time period from a different room in the family's country house...
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...
Indeed, it's those populist, regional roots that helped shape Ayckbourn's aesthetic: his commitment to exploring serious and subtle themes without abandoning his primary job of keeping an audience entertained. "I grew up in this little town writing for a theater that relies entirely on its audience to survive," he 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...