Alan Ayckbourn
Alan Ayckbourn
Sir Alan Ayckbourn, CBEis a prolific English playwright and director. He has written and produced more than seventy full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth12 April 1939
Cats names are more for human benefit. They give one a certain degree more confidence that the animal belongs to you.
Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare.
A comedy is just a tragedy interrupted, I once said. Do you finish with the kiss or when she opens her eyes to tell him she loves him and sees blonde hairs on his collar?
He really is terribly heavy going. Like running up hill in roller skates.
What I find interesting is how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I'm more interested in, there's the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious.
There is a school of thought that believes that sleep is for the night. You appear to be out to disprove them.
There are very few people on top of life, and the rest of us don't like them very much.
The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa.
If you are flattering a woman, it pays to be a little more subtle. You don't have to bother with men, they believe any compliment automatically.
Few women care to be laughed at and men not at all, except for large sums of money.
As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.
I think of a plot, I think of an idea, and then I wonder, How can I get that onto the stage? . . . Whatever devices you use should always be there to serve the theme. If the theme has been overtaken by the device, then something's wrong.
A gentleman ... sleeps at his work. That's what work's for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library? So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.
Salad, I can't bear salad. It grows while you're eating it, you know.