Intimate Exchanges, Volume I: A Play

by Alan Ayckbourn

There are no less than eight intimate exchanges in this ingenious tour de farce and each has two different endings; you can see Intimate Exchanges sixteen times and not see the same play twice! And one actor and one actress play all 10 characters. This is Ayckbourn's most unusual look yet at the foibles of middle class living.|1 woman, 1 man

Genres: Drama, Plays

220 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1985

About the author

Sir Alan Ayckbourn is a popular and prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-three 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 opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967. Major successes include Absurd Person Singular (1975), The Norman Conquests trilogy (1973), Bedroom Farce (1975), Just Between Ourselves (1976), A Chorus of Disapproval (1984), Woman in Mind (1985), A Small Family Business (1987), Man Of The Moment (1988), House & Garden (1999) and Private Fears in Public Places (2004). His plays have won numerous awards, including seven London Evening Standard Awards. They have been translated into over 35 languages and are performed on stage and television throughout the world. Ten of his plays have been staged on Broadway, attracting two Tony nominations, and one Tony award.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

The central figures in this running battle of the sexes are two middle-class, thirty something couples in a cozy London suburb, languishing in marriages that have run out of gas. Toby Teasdale is the slightly stuffy, lately tipsy, headmaster of an upscale prep school; his wife, Celia, also slightly stuffy, is lately fed up. Toby's best friend, Miles Coombes, is a tweedy bumbler matched to a flamboyant wife given to practical jokes and indiscreet affairs.

Intimate Exchanges is an epic which comprises of eight plays generated from a single opening scene. Celia Teasdale enters her garden to have a cigarette. The doorbell rings and she decides whether to light her cigarette or not ...

[Janna Maron · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? Ayckbourn is simply a genius playwright.

[Mindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the script to a play that Ken and I went to see a few months ago. It has something like 8 possible different ending and we were curious to see what we'd missed. (We only attended one ending and the production we saw only staged 2 possible endings.) I am really glad that I read the whole thing! It sort of changed the play from a funny play with a quirky gimmick to a look at the choices we make and the impact that they have on not only ourselves, but those around us.

[Duncan Maccoll · Rating 5 out of 5]

We attended four of the eight substantial plays in the Intimate Exchanges series at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough during July 2006. During this series all the parts were played by the brilliant Claudia Elmhirst and the excellent Bill Champion. What more can I say?