Alan Ayckbourn: Grinning at the Edge

by Paul Allen

Alan Ayckbourn is Britain's most popular playwright and its most private. He has won numerous awards for his plays - including Absurd Person Singular, The Norman Conquests, Just Between Ourselves, A Chorus of Disapproval and Communicating Doors - and has worked with some of theatre's most celebrated names - Jane Asher, Richard Briers, Michael Gambon, Julia McKenzie, Penelope Keith, and Peter Hall. Feted from London to New York to Tokyo, he was knighted in 1997 for his services to the theatre. Yet he spends most of his time away from the limelight in a Yorkshire seaside town not writing at all but running a small repertory theatre.In this biography Paul Allen explores Ayckbourn's family background, looking at his unsettled and sometimes solitary childhood. There follows a hasty first marriage, the often farcical life of a frustrated young actor, and the setbacks and false dawns endured by the novice writer before he became the great comic hitmaker of the 1970s. Audiences since have been literally falling into the aisles or overloading theatre PA systems with the volume of their laughter, even as they register the seriousness of his preoccupation with man's inhumanity to woman. With the first-hand testimony of scores of colleagues who have worked with Ayckbourn at length in Scarborough as well as the more celebrated London collaborators, Allen traces the development of his more savagely comic critique of public life in the 1980s and '90s.This is a portrait of a man who - from Relatively Speaking in 1965 to his double play House and Garden at the National Theatre in 2000 - has chronicled human behavior, our aspirations and insecurities, while shaping the theatrical experience of millions.

Genres: Theatre

352 pages, Hardcover

First published September 27, 2001

About the author

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Basia Korzeniowska · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this tome for my 50th birthday. Hardback, over 400 closely printed pages which I started reading a few months ago. I only managed a few pages at a time before going to sleep and only when we were in the cottage which wasn't every weekend. But it was gripping. Paul Allen obviously knew Ayckbourn very well and gives us a wealth of detail about his life, his loves and his writing. Process, page to stage, production etc. I found the whole thing fascinating - I've seen only a few of the plays myself but reading about his whole oeuvre made the ones I've watched come to life again, and shed a lot of new light. It took me a long time to start but I am so pleased i did. Thank you for my present Andrew Godden!