Alan ayckbourn brief biography example

At the age of twelve he received at Barclays Bank scholarship to attend Haileybury, a prestigious boarding school in Hertfordshire—just north of London. At Haileybury, Ayckbourn became interested in theatre under the guidance of Edgar Matthews. Matthews was a French teacher at Haileybury, but every year he directed a Shakespearian play that would tour the continent during the school holidays.

Ayckbourn auditioned for Matthews at the age of fifteen, and was cast in a production of Romeo and Juliet. This experience cemented a lifelong love of theatre. In , at the age of seventeen, Ayckbourn decided to leave school and pursue a career in theatre. Ayckbourn served as an assistant stage manager, and had a role in the production as a sentry.

In the spring of , Ayckbourn saw his first theatre-in-the-round production. Stephen Joseph, himself, would become a mentor for Ayckbourn, and encouraged him to write and direct.

Alan ayckbourn brief biography example

In , Ayckbourn complained about the quality of the role he was playing for Joseph. The show proved to be so successful that Joseph commissioned another play for the winter of Whatnot received a production in London in , but was so savaged by the critics that Ayckbourn went to Leeds to work for the BBC as a radio drama producer. A role he was to have from — Fortunately, Ayckbourn continued to write during this period.

In the play, retitled Relatively Speaking , opened in the West End and was a huge success. This launched his career in London. While was a good year for Ayckbourn professionally, it was a year that saw a major personal loss. His mentor, and champion, Stephen Joseph passed away that year. Ayckbourn, along with three other men, worked to keep the Library Theatre alive.

In , Ayckbourn took over, officially, as the Artistic Director in A position he would hold, minus a two year break between and to be a company director at the National Theatre, until his retirement in During his tenure at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Ayckbourn was a committed advocate of theatre-in-the-round. It has frequently been stated that the definitive production of an Alan Ayckbourn play is the premiere production in-the-round in Scarborough, where he has premiered all but four of his plays.

Murgatroyd, Alan Ayckbourn: Long Biography, Given the themes of marriage that Ayckbourn frequently visits in his plays, it is important to quickly look at his own interesting history. In he married Christine Roland, a company member at the Library Theatre. Together they had two sons: Steven and Philip. Ayckbourn and Christine separated in , but did not get divorced until , after Ayckbourn was awarded a knighthood.

Ayckbourn then married Heather Stoney, with his divorce form Christine timed so that both wives could use the title Lady Ayckbourn if they so wished. His new family consisted of his mother, his stepfather and Christopher, his stepfather's son by an earlier marriage. This relationship too, reportedly ran into difficulties early on. Ayckbourn attended Haileybury and Imperial Service College , in the village of Hertford Heath and, while there, he toured Europe and America with the school's Shakespeare company.

After leaving school at 17, Ayckbourn took several temporary jobs in various places before starting a temporary position at the Scarborough Library Theatre , where he was introduced to the artistic director, Stephen Joseph. Ayckbourn's career was briefly interrupted when he was called up for National Service. He was swiftly discharged, officially on medical grounds, but it is suggested that a doctor who noticed his reluctance to join the Armed Forces deliberately failed the medical as a favour.

Ayckbourn said that his relationship with Roland became easy once they agreed their marriage was over. About this time, he shared a home with Heather Stoney, [ 18 ] an actress he had first met ten years earlier. In February , he suffered a stroke in Scarborough, and stated: "I hope to be back on my feet, or should I say my left leg, as soon as possible, but I know it is going to take some time.

In the meantime I am in excellent hands and so is the Stephen Joseph Theatre. Since the time Ayckbourn's plays became established in the West End, interviewers have raised the question of whether his work is autobiographical. There has been only one biography, written by Paul Allen, which primarily covers his career in the theatre. In Bedroom Farce , for example, he admitted to being, in some respects, all four of the men in the play.

What is less clear is the extent to which events in Ayckbourn's life have influenced his writing. It is true that the theme of marriages in difficulty was heavily present throughout his plays in the early seventies, at about the time his own marriage was coming to an end. However, by that time, he had also witnessed the failure of his parents' relationships and those of some of his friends.

Both characters feel themselves to be in trouble and there was speculation that Ayckbourn himself might have felt the same way. At the time, he had reportedly become seriously involved with another actress, which threatened his relationship with Stoney. It is possible that Ayckbourn wrote plays with himself and his own situation in mind but, as Ayckbourn is portrayed as a guarded and private man, [ 26 ] it is hard to imagine him exposing his own life in his plays to any great degree.

In the biography, Paul Allen writes, with regard to a suggestion in Cosmopolitan that Ayckbourn's plays were becoming autobiographical: "If we take that to mean that his plays tell his own life story, he still hasn't started. On leaving school, Ayckbourn's theatrical career began immediately, when his French master introduced him to Sir Donald Wolfit.

When he complained about the quality of a script he was performing, Joseph challenged him to write a better one. The result was The Square Cat , written under the pseudonym Roland Allen and first performed in In , after thirty-four appearances in plays at the Library Theatre, including four of his own, Ayckbourn moved to Stoke-on-Trent to help set up the Victoria Theatre now the New Vic , [ 36 ] where he appeared in a further eighteen plays.

Whatnot , but reportedly because was having trouble working with the artistic director, Peter Cheeseman. This led to his conclusion that acting was more trouble than it was worth. Ayckbourn's first play, The Square Cat , was sufficiently popular locally to secure further commissions, although neither this nor the following three plays had much impact beyond Scarborough.

Ayckbourn's fortunes revived in with Mr. Whatnot , which also premiered at the Victoria Theatre. This was the first play that Ayckbourn was sufficiently happy with to allow continued performances today, and the first play to receive a West End performance. However, the West End production flopped, in part due to misguided casting. Ayckbourn used the pseudonym Peter Caulfield because he was under exclusive contract to the BBC at the time.

His next play, The Sparrow ran for only three weeks at Scarborough [ 48 ] [ 49 ] but the following play, How the Other Half Loves , secured his runaway success as a playwright. These plays focused heavily on marriage in the British middle classes. The only failure during this period was a musical with Andrew Lloyd Webber , Jeeves ; even this did little to dent Ayckbourn's career.

From the s, Ayckbourn moved away from the recurring theme of marriage to explore other contemporary issues. One example was Woman in Mind , a play performed entirely from the perspective of a woman going through a nervous breakdown. He also diversified into children's theatre, such as Mr A's Amazing Maze Plays and musical plays, such as By Jeeves a more successful rewrite of the original Jeeves.

Despite his success, honours and awards which include a prestigious Laurence Olivier Award , Alan Ayckbourn remains a relatively anonymous figure, dedicated to regional theatre. Although Ayckbourn's plays no longer dominate the theatrical scene on the scale of his earlier works, he continues to write. Ayckbourn continues to write for the Stephen Joseph Theatre on the invitation of his successor as artistic director, Chris Monks.

The first new play under this arrangement, My Wonderful Day , was performed in October Ayckbourn continues to experiment with theatrical form. The play Roundelay opened in September ; before each performance, members of the audience are invited to extract five coloured ping pong balls from a bag, leaving the order in which each of the five acts is played left to chance, and allowing possible permutations.

In , Ayckbourn had published his first novel, The Divide , which had previously been showcased during a reading at the Stephen Joseph Theatre. As a consequence of the Covid lockdown, Ayckbourn's play, Anno Domino, was recorded as a radio production, with Ayckbourn and his wife Heather playing all the roles. In , the first Ayckbourn play in around 60 years premiered in a venue other than Scarborough: All Lies at the Old Laundry in Bowness-on-Windermere.

Most of the remaining time is spent directing. Ayckbourn began directing at the Scarborough Library Theatre in , with a production of Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton. Between and , much of his time was taken up by various productions of his early successes, Mr. Whatnot and Relatively Speaking and he directed only one play, The Sparrow , which he wrote and which was later withdrawn.

In , he resumed directing plays regularly, mostly at Scarborough. At first, his directing career was kept separate from his writing career. It was not until that Ayckbourn directed a play of his own a revival of Standing Room Only and before he directed a premiere of his own The Sparrow. After the death of Stephen Joseph in , the Director of Productions was appointed on an annual basis.

Ayckbourn was offered the position in and , succeeding Rodney Wood, but he handed the position over to Caroline Smith in , having spent most that year in the US with How the Other Half Loves. He became Director of Productions again in and, on 12 November of that year, he was made the permanent artistic director of the theatre. In mid, Ayckbourn accepted an invitation to work as a visiting director for two years at the National Theatre in London, to form his own company, and perform a play in each of the three auditoria, provided at least one was a new play of his own.

He announced in that he would step back from directing the work of other playwrights, to concentrate on his own plays, [ 72 ] the last one being Rob Shearman 's Knights in Plastic Armour in ; he made one exception in , when he directed the world premiere of Tim Firth 's The Safari Party. In , following a dispute over the Duchess Theatre 's handling of Damsels in Distress , Ayckbourn sharply criticised both this and the West End 's treatment of theatre in general and, in particular, their casting of celebrities.

Ayckbourn suffered a stroke in February and returned to work in September; the premiere of his 70th play If I Were You at the Stephen Joseph Theatre came the following month. He announced in June that he would retire as artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre after the season. In March , he directed an in-the-round revival of his play Taking Steps at the Orange Tree Theatre , winning universal press acclaim.

The show ran in The Stephen Joseph Theatre and received critical acclaim. Ayckbourn also sits on the Council of the Society of Authors. A Chorus of Disapproval. The Revengers' Comedies [ nb 15 ]. Alan Ayckbourn has written eight one-act plays. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version.

In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item. English playwright born This article uses citations that link to broken or outdated sources. Please improve the article by addressing link rot or discuss this issue on the talk page. May Learn how and when to remove this message. Life [ edit ]. Childhood [ edit ]. Adult life [ edit ].

Influence on plays [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Early career and acting [ edit ]. Writing [ edit ]. Directing [ edit ]. Honours and awards [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. Full-length plays [ edit ]. This includes the full-length plays performed but later withdrawn and full-length plays for family audiences, but excludes revues and musical entertainments, adaptations of other plays, plays for children, individual one-act plays, "grey plays" those written for performance but not publication and plays for television.

It also treats each of the plays in The Norman Conquests , House and Garden and Damsels in Distress as one play each, the one-acts from Confusions as a single full-length play, all variations of Intimate Exchanges as one play likewise for Sisterly Feelings and It Could Be Any One Of Us , both parts of The Revengers' Comedies as a single play, and the rewrites of Jeeves and Callisto 5 as the same play as the original.

Other sources may number plays differently. Premieres from were at the current Stephen Joseph Theatre, in the Round unless otherwise stated. In some productions, the official premiere date was later than the actual opening night. The premiere date is shown here. It is not available for production and it is intended that the script will never be published.

However, a copy is available at the Bob Watson archive in Scarborough. Archived from the original on 17 May Retrieved 23 September The eight variations offered after the third fork are often treated as individual plays. One-act plays [ edit ].