Alan Ayckbourn

Robin Herford and Tessa Peake-Jones star in Alan Ayckbourn's award-winning trilogy: Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden. This trilogy has been hailed as a mold-breaking masterpiece. All three plays take place concurrentlyso an exit in one becomes an entrance in anotherand can be played in any order. The story of the same dreadful weekend is illuminated from three different vantage points: the living room, the sitting room, and the garden. With a distinguished cast including Robin Herford as Norman and Tessa Peake-Jones as Sarah, The Norman Conquests is a brilliantly entertaining comedy of our time: wise and witty, funny and profound.

This is a trilogy of plays by the most performed playwright in the world, all set in a flat in Docklands. Lynettes teenage daughter comes up with a surprising way to save the family finances. A night of passion takes a mysterious and dangerous turn. An important family occasion is thrown into chaos by the arrival of some uninvited guests.

Love stories yet to happen, in a future filled with surprises. Who is the amorous stranger, Titus, who materialises in young Graces bedroom? Can she believe he is who he says he is? For her parents, Franklin and Martha, does love everlasting still hold true if death is postponed indefinitely? Can lawyer Lorraine, who prides herself on her infallibility, have finally discovered the ideal partner, one who is also never wrong? Will lonely secretary Sylvia, after unhappy affairs with everyone from deep sea divers to space shuttle pilots, ever find her Mr Right? A comedy with its head in the future and its heart in the past, Alan Ayckbourns Surprises premiered in July 2012 at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, in a co-production with Chichester Festival Theatre.

Alan Ayckbourns play is about a very ordinary teenager called Lucy. With her father glued to the cowboys on the telly, her mother preoccupied with neighbourly gossip and her brother enclosed in his ear-phones, no one wants to know about her place in the school swimming team. So Lucy revives her childhood fantasy friend, Zara, setting a place for her at the very ordinary tea table. This time Zara materializes, bringing with her an idealized father and brother, and showing Lucy how to make her real family vanish. The moral of this cautionary tale is carefully spelt out - that when you get what you want its not what you wanted - as Lucys dream family turns out to be a nightmare. The play is supposedly for children of seven upwards, but theres a message here for parents, too, about listening to kids.

With over sixty plays written and premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough before going on to play in the West End or the Royal National Theatre, London, or Broadway, Alan Ayckbourns expertise in writing and directing plays is unsurpassed. For the first time, here in The Crafty Art of Playmaking, he shares all his tricks of the trade. From helpful hints on writing (Where do you start? How do you continue? What is comedy and how do you write it? What is tragedy and how does it work?), to tips on directing (working with actors and technicians, when to listen to the other experts, how to cope with rehearsals), the book provides a complete primer for the tyro and a refresher for the more experienced. Written in an accessible and highly entertaining style, with anecdotes galore to illustrate the how, when, where and why, its worth the cover price for the jokes alone.A marvellously useful and enjoyably good-humoured bookDaily Telegraph

Snake in the GrassA terrific piece - brilliant, bizarre and yet totally believable . . . In fact, its more than classic; its close to the top of its class. Yorkshire PostIf I Were YouA blissfully funny comedy thats also filled with sadness, a devilishly simple theatrical idea that spins out all kinds of complex truths about human nature. Daily TelegraphLife and BethA wise, humane, funny play about the inevitability of death and the continuity of life. GuardianMy Wonderful DayA transformation happens as magical as the most magnificent pantomime transformation anyone could ever imagine . . . the playwright dissolves the paraphernalia of our adult selves and uncovers that space inside each of us that is still the child we once were. ObserverLife of RileyAs perceptive as ever . . . Ayckbourn has once again achieved a satisfyingly rich, tragi-comic complexity. Daily Telegraph

The central character of Alan Ayckbourns new play is Susan, a parsons wife, one of the most moving and devastating that he has created... Robin Thornber reviewing the first production in Scarboroug

Well, thats one down, isnt it. Nine to go. Next! Thou shalt not kill. What about that then? Lets have a crack at that one next, shall we? Jack McCracken: a man of principle in a corrupt world. But not for long. Moments after taking over his father-in-laws business hes approached by a private detective armed with some compromising information. Jacks integrity fades away as he discovers his extended family to be thieves and adulterers, looting the business from their suburban homes. Rampant self-interest takes over and comic hysteria builds to a macabre climax. A riotous exposure of entrepreneurial greed, Alan Ayckbourns A Small Family Business, premiered at the National Theatre in 1987 and returned there in April 2014.

How Ms Poopay Dayseer, a twenty-first century Specialist Sexual Consultant, whilst peddling her services to an elderly hotel room client unexpectedly finds herself running for her life. How her flight through a communicating door brings her face to face with her own past and with Ruella who apparently died under suspicious circumstances twenty years earlier. And how Poopays gradual friendship with that remarkable woman changes the future for both of them... A time-travelling comedy thriller, Communicating Doors was published to coincide with the West End opening in 1995.

Now we dont want to start Christmas like this, do we? Cheating at snakes and ladders, fighting over comic books, a bungled infidelity beneath the tree. Christmas has arrived in the Bunker household along with family and friends. But as the children lurk just out of sight, its the adults who are letting the side down. I couldnt. Not in our sitting-room. Not in front of the television. Somewhere else. Presiding over the festivities are two warring uncles, one a kindly, incompetent doctor with an interminable puppet show to perform; the other a bullying retired security guard who dominates the TV, brings toy guns for his nieces and determines theres a thief in their midst. Alan Ayckbourns masterly Seasons Greetings offers a seriously entertaining look at the misery and high jinks of an average family Christmas. The play opens at the National Theatre, London, in December 2010.Three times I caught him at it. Ripping open presents, helping himself to the contents.

With an Introduction by the author.The prolific master of suburban mayhem has still got his mojo.Evening StandardTime of My LifeOne of Mr. Ayckbourns most virtuosic experiments in postmodern narrative.Wall Street JournalNeighbourhood WatchAyckbourns tartly topical, pitch-black comedy, a startling evocation of the panic induced by nightmarish notions of "broken Britain"... An arresting, nastily comic cautionary tale.The TimesArrivals and DeparturesAyckbourns genius lies in his ability to write what you might call sad comedies, uproariously funny farces that are at second glance deeply serious, at times despairing portraits of modern middle-class life and its discontents. On occasion, as in Arrivals & Departures, he puts the despair at centre stage, and what results is a play that at bottom can no longer be called a comedy at all.Wall Street JournalHeros Welcome Alan Ayckbourn is the poet laureate of missed connections. In play after pensive, droll and acid play, Ayckbourn anatomizes how we fail to understand and trust our lovers and friends.GuardianA Brief History of WomenAs A Brief History of Women follows Spates at twenty year intervals through the next sixty years, it becomes progressively more funny, more tender, more Ayckbourn. Ayckbourn knows that moments of real connection between people are hard-won and hard to forget.The Times

Rockfist Slims enemies have just plunged him into yet another desperate situation when Kevin has to close his detective book and go to sleep. But his own adventure is only just beginning. Fast-moving, fun and full of special effects, Ayckbourns wonderfully inventive play for children brings alive several well-known childrens books as Kevin and Rockfist Slim escape the baddies and plunge into many different worlds.The Boy Who Fell into a Book premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, in December 1998.

This third volume of Alan Ayckbourn plays includes Haunting Julia, Sugar Daddies, Drowning on Dry Land and Private Fears in Public Places, with an introduction by the author.Haunting JuliaA play for today. It touches on the failures of education and parenting, on media pressure and overdoses. Kurt Cobain comes to mind. More universally, Haunting Julia mourns how in adolescence and adulthood, we do our loves wrong.Financial TimesSugar DaddiesA timely warning about the dangers of role-playing and pretence . . . But the real fascination lies in watching Ayckbourns own transformation from social observer to impassioned moralist.GuardianDrowning on Dry LandAyckbourn at the top of his game.GuardianA coruscatingly acid and funny play.The TimesPrivate Fears in Public PlacesAyckbourns construction has a masterly clarity; his writing combines ruthless observation with mature tolerance. Nobody else writing today can create a sense of a complicated little world in 90 minutes, or make banal lives seem so unforgivably interesting. Listen: its a masters voice.Sunday Times

The first volume of Alan Ayckbourns collected work contains his morality plays from the 1980s. It includes the plays A Chorus of Disapproval, A Small Family Business, Henceforward . . ., and Man of t

The Revengers ComediesA hugely entertaining pitch that recalls the old movies to which it frequently pays homage - Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Kind Hearts and Coronets - and expands after intermission to reveal an immensely disturbing vision of contemporary middle-class England poisoned by the rise of economic ruthlessness and the collapse of ethics. New York Times Things We Do for LoveLloyds Private Banking Playwright of the Year AwardOne of his best, his most shockingly and uproariously funny: a cruel and hilarious masterpiece of tragic comedy and comic tragedy. Sunday TimesHouse & GardenThe triumph of his ingenuity lies in the fact that you have to see both plays . . . A second time round, in whichever order you take them, characters will deepen, while those you know become the background. It is a superb Ayckbourn joke that a comedy about non-communication should depend on the sharpest communication skills. Sunday Times

A treat to read and a joy to perform, this second collection of Alan Ayckbourns work is a cornucopia of some of his wonderfully inventive childrens plays. From the story of the teenage Lucy in Invisible Friends who revives her childhood imaginary friend when things get difficult at home, onto the storytellers in My Very Own Story and This Is Where We Came In and, finally, to young Ernie who illucinates all sorts of wild and weird happenings with astonishing results.