Search results for ""Author Alan Ayckbourn""

Now we don't 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, it's the adults who are letting the side down. I couldn't. 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 there's a thief in their midst. Alan Ayckbourn's masterly Season's 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.

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Alan Ayckbourn's 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 it's not what you wanted - as Lucy's dream family turns out to be a nightmare. The play is supposedly for children of seven upwards, but there's a message here for parents, too, about listening to kids.

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Well, that's one down, isn't it. Nine to go. Next! Thou shalt not kill. What about that then? Let's 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-law's business he's approached by a private detective armed with some compromising information.Jack's 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 Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business, premiered at the National Theatre in 1987 and returned there in April 2014.

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With over sixty plays written and premièred 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 Ayckbourn's 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, it's worth the cover price for the jokes alone.'A marvellously useful and enjoyably good-humoured book' Daily Telegraph

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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

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Snake in the Grass"A terrific piece - brilliant, bizarre and yet totally believable... In fact, it's more than classic; it's close to the top of its class." Yorkshire PostIf I Were You"A blissfully funny comedy that's also filled with sadness, a devilishly simple theatrical idea that spins out all kinds of complex truths about human nature." Daily TelegraphLife and Beth"A wise, humane, funny play about the inevitability of death and the continuity of life." GuardianMy Wonderful Day"A 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 Riley"As perceptive as ever... Ayckbourn has once again achieved a satisfyingly rich, tragi-comic complexity." Daily Telegraph

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With an Introduction by the author.'The prolific master of suburban mayhem has still got his mojo.' Evening StandardTime of My Life'One of Mr. Ayckbourn's most virtuosic experiments in postmodern narrative.' Wall Street JournalNeighbourhood Watch'Ayckbourn's 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 Departures'Ayckbourn's 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 JournalHero's 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 Women'As 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

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Love stories yet to happen, in a future filled with surprises.Who is the amorous stranger, Titus, who materialises in young Grace's 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 Ayckbourn's Surprises premiered in July 2012 at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, in a co-production with Chichester Festival Theatre.

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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 Julia'A 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 Daddies'A timely warning about the dangers of role-playing and pretence . . . But the real fascination lies in watching Ayckbourn's own transformation from social observer to impassioned moralist.' GuardianDrowning on Dry Land'Ayckbourn at the top of his game.' Guardian'A coruscatingly acid and funny play.' The TimesPrivate Fears in Public Places'Ayckbourn's 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: it's a master's voice.' Sunday Times

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'What is remarkable about Alan Ayckbourn's comedy is that it contrives to be simultaneously hilarious and harrowing. Literally, it is agonisingly funny'Daily TelegraphIn Three Plays Ayckbourn's perfectly pitched dialogue slices into the soul of suburbia. The settings are simple - a kitchen, a bedroom, a party - but the relationships between the husbands and wives are more complicated. Fraught relationships are exposed with humour, bathos and a sharp understanding of human nature.

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Rockfist Slim's 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, Ayckbourn's wonderfully inventive play for children brings alive several well-known children's 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.

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A student edition of five one-act plays by Britain's most popular playwright. Ayckbourn's series of plays for 4-5 actors typify his black comedies of human behaviour. First produced in 1976, the plays are alternately naturalistic, stylised and farcical, but underlying each is the problem of loneliness. The Mother Figure shows a mother unable to escape from baby talk; in The Drinking Companion an absentee husband attempts seduction without success; in Between Mouthfuls, a waiter oversees a fraught dinner encounter. A garden party gets out of hand in Gosforth's Fete whilst A Talk in the Park is a revue style curtain call piece for the five actors. Whether the comedies concern marital conflict, infidelity or motherhood and take place on a park bench or at a village fete, the characters are familiar and their cries for help instantly recognisable. "Principally he is respected as a radical re-inventor of form" Dominic Dromgoole

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Ever wondered what else happened to Sleeping Beauty when she finally woke up in the 21st century? Alan Ayckbourn provides the answer with this alternative seasonal fare in the musical "Awaking Beauty". The Prince awakens Princess Aurora and the eager, happy young couple are about to embark on their first night of passionate love when ugly, unloved Carabosse, the wicked witch, butts in having taken a fancy to the Prince. But which one will be the Awaking Beauty? Love, lust, triplets and the ultimate in makeovers are just some of the milestones our heroes and heroines must pass before they can all live happily ever after. The four major roles are for two men and two women with six narrators playing a variety of other characters as well as providing the vocal harmonies and an astonishing range of sound effects!

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