Next week, Sir Alan Ayckbourn will celebrate his 80th birthday. Eighty glorious years, during which he has written more than 80 plays — more than any living British dramatist and more than twice as many as Shakespeare.
Over half are stage staples, a few undying classics. If you enter a theatre anywhere in the country, professional or amateur, the odds are that Sir Alan has made you laugh, from his first West End hit in 1967, Relatively Speaking, to Absurd Person Singular, Bedroom Farce, How The Other Half Loves, A Chorus Of Disapproval, The Norman Conquests and on and on.
Your laugh may be an involuntary yelp: the refreshing shock of a ‘can-you-believe-it’ moment when you realise that yes, you can, because it arose from a very recognisable piece of human behaviour.
Sir Alan Ayckbourn (above) will celebrate his 80th birthday next week. Eighty glorious years, during which he has written more than 80 plays. His 83rd play, Birthdays Past, Birthdays Present, opens this autumn in Scarborough [File photo]
You may have met Ayckbourn’s work on film or a few TV adaptations but, rarely among modern playwrights, the master never writes directly for the screen.
One suspects that as a former actor and director, he is joyfully addicted to these moments of shared hysteria when we’re all in the same room.
Especially if the room is his beloved Scarborough circular theatre, the Stephen Joseph. All but four of his plays premiered there and he served as artistic director for 37 years.
Maybe there’s a character he created that sticks in your memory, with a smile. Perhaps the hopeless doctor in Season’s Greetings, pronouncing to the chaotic family: ‘This man is dead’ just before the aggrieved corpse sits up.
Or the furious amateur opera company director, Dafydd ap Llewellyn, in A Chorus Of Disapproval, snarling at his rival: ‘You bastard. One of these days I hope you get what’s coming to you. Having said that, best of luck for the show tonight.’
Ayckbourn’s stars: June Whitfield and Richard Briers in Bedroom Farce. If you enter a theatre anywhere in the country, professional or amateur, the odds are that Sir Alan has made you laugh
Or perhaps you boggled at the sheer interlocked ingenuity of the three plays in The Norman Conquests: a jigsaw in which each play shows what is happening, at the same time or adrift by minutes, in three parts of a dilapidated vicarage: dining room, living room, garden.
Sometimes a character exits one play to join another, or comes in from a scene you’ve yet to see. Extraordinarily, though, you can see them in any order and it still makes sense, both snortingly comic and personally tragic.
Ah yes, tragic: that is part of it, the wonderful thing about Ayckbourn’s observant, sad-heartedly compassionate vision. As he says, a comedy is just a tragedy that stops at a certain point.
Ayckbourn once said he wanted to see ‘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.’
Over six decades of writing, he has accumulated Olivier and Tony Awards and been a knight these past 20 years.
Jane Horrocks and David Bamber are pictured above in Absurd Person Singular. Sir Alan has been open about how his own early years taught him the awkwardness of human
