Alan Ayckbourn

Sir Alan Ayckbourn is a prolific British playwright and director. As of 2025, he has written and produced 91 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, The Norman Conquests trilogy, Absent Friends, Bedroom Farce, Just Between Ourselves, A Chorus of Disapproval, Woman in Mind, A Small Family Business, Man of the Moment, House & Garden and Private Fears in Public Places. 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.

Life

Childhood

Ayckbourn was born in Hampstead, London. His mother, Irene Worley , was a writer of short stories who published under the name "Mary James". His father, Horace Ayckbourn, was an orchestral violinist and was the lead violinist at the London Symphony Orchestra. His parents, who separated shortly after World War II, never married, and Ayckbourn's mother divorced her first husband to marry again in 1948.
Ayckbourn wrote his first play at Wisborough Lodge when he was about 10. While he was at prep school as a boarder, his mother wrote to tell him she was marrying Cecil Pye, a bank manager. 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.

Adult life

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. It is said that Joseph became both a mentor and father figure for Ayckbourn until his untimely death in 1967, and Ayckbourn has consistently spoken highly of him.
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. Although Ayckbourn continued to move wherever his career took him, he settled in Scarborough, eventually buying Longwestgate House, which had previously been owned by his mentor, Joseph.
In 1957, Ayckbourn married Christine Roland, another member of the Library Theatre company. Ayckbourn's first two plays were, in fact, written jointly with her under the pseudonym of "Roland Allen". They had two sons, Steven and Philip. However, the marriage had difficulties, which eventually led to their separation in 1971. 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, an actress he had first met ten years earlier. Like his mother, neither he nor Roland sought an immediate divorce and it was not until thirty years later, in 1997, that they were formally divorced and Ayckbourn married Stoney. One side effect of the timing is that, when Ayckbourn was awarded a knighthood a few months before the divorce, both his first and second wives were entitled to take the title of Lady Ayckbourn.
In February 2006, 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." He left hospital after eight weeks and returned to directing after six months. The following year, Ayckbourn announced he would step down as artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre. He continues, however, to write and direct his own work at the theatre.

Influence on plays

Since the time Ayckbourn's plays became established in the West End, interviewers have raised the question of whether his work is autobiographical. There is no clear answer to this question. There has been only one biography, written by Paul Allen, which primarily covers his career in the theatre. Ayckbourn has frequently said he sees aspects of himself in all of his characters. In Bedroom Farce, for example, he admitted to being, in some respects, all four of the men in the play. It has been suggested that, after Ayckbourn himself, the person who is used most often in his plays is his mother, particularly as Susan in Woman in Mind.
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. Which relationships, if any, he drew on for his plays, is unclear. In Paul Allen's biography, Ayckbourn is briefly compared with Dafydd and Guy in A Chorus of Disapproval. 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 unclear whether this had any effect on the writing; Paul Allen's view is that Ayckbourn did not use his personal experiences to write his plays.
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, 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."

Career

Early career and acting

On leaving school, Ayckbourn's theatrical career began immediately, when his French master introduced him to Sir Donald Wolfit. Ayckbourn joined Wolfit on tour to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as an acting assistant stage manager for three weeks. His first experiences on the professional stage were various roles in The Strong are Lonely by Fritz Hochwälder. In the following year, Ayckbourn appeared in six other plays at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing and the Thorndike theatre, Leatherhead where Hazel Vincent Wallace employed him as both an actor and an assistant stage manager.
In 1957, Ayckbourn was employed by the director Stephen Joseph at the Library Theatre, Scarborough, the predecessor to the modern Stephen Joseph Theatre. Again, his role was initially as acting stage manager. This employment led to Ayckbourn's first professional script commission, in 1958. 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 1959. In this play, Ayckbourn himself played the character of Jerry Watiss.
In 1962, 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, where he appeared in a further eighteen plays. His final appearance in one of his own plays was as the Crimson Gollywog in the disastrous children's play Christmas v Mastermind. He left the Stoke company in 1964, officially to commit his time to the London production of Mr. Whatnot, but reportedly because was having trouble working with the artistic director, Peter Cheeseman. By now, his career as a writer was coming to fruition and his acting career was sidelined.
His final role on stage was as Jerry in Two for the Seesaw by William Gibson, at the Civic Theatre in Rotherham. He was left stranded on stage because Heather Stoney was unable to re-appear due to her props not being ready for use. This led to his conclusion that acting was more trouble than it was worth. The assistant stage manager on the production, Bill Kenwright, would go on to become one of the UK's most successful producers.

Writing

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. Following his transfer to Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent, Christmas v Mastermind, flopped; this play is now universally regarded as Ayckbourn's greatest disaster.
Ayckbourn's fortunes revived in 1963 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. After this, Ayckbourn experimented by collaborating with comedians, first writing a monologue for Tommy Cooper, and later with Ronnie Barker, who played Lord Slingsby-Craddock in the London production of Mr Whatnot in 1964, on the scripts for LWT's Hark at Barker. Ayckbourn used the pseudonym Peter Caulfield because he was under exclusive contract to the BBC at the time.
In 1965, back at the Scarborough Library Theatre, Meet my Father was produced, and later retitled Relatively Speaking. This time, the play was a massive success, both in Scarborough and in the West End, earning Ayckbourn a congratulatory telegram from Noël Coward. This was not quite the end of Ayckbourn's hit-and-miss record. His next play, The Sparrow ran for only three weeks at Scarborough but the following play, How the Other Half Loves, secured his runaway success as a playwright.
The height of Ayckbourn's commercial success came with plays such as Absurd Person Singular, The Norman Conquests trilogy, Bedroom Farce and Just Between Ourselves. These plays focused heavily on marriage in the British middle classes. The only failure during this period was a 1975 musical with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jeeves; even this did little to dent Ayckbourn's career.
From the 1980s, 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 experimented with unconventional ways of writing plays: Intimate Exchanges, for example, has one beginning and sixteen possible endings, and in House & Garden, two plays take place simultaneously on two separate stages. He also diversified into children's theatre, such as Mr A's Amazing Maze Plays and musical plays, such as By Jeeves.
With a résumé of over seventy plays, of which more than forty have played at the National Theatre or in the West End, Alan Ayckbourn is one of England's most successful living playwrights. Despite his success, honours and awards, Alan Ayckbourn remains a relatively anonymous figure, dedicated to regional theatre. Throughout his writing career, all but four of his plays premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough in its three different locations.
Ayckbourn received the CBE in 1987 and was knighted in the 1997 New Year Honours. It is frequently claimed that Alan Ayckbourn is the most performed living English playwright, and the second most performed of all time, after Shakespeare.
Although Ayckbourn's plays no longer dominate the theatrical scene on the scale of his earlier works, he continues to write. Among major success has been Private Fears in Public Places, which had a hugely successful Off-Broadway run at 59E59 Theaters and, in 2006, was made into a film, Cœurs, directed by Alain Resnais. After Ayckbourn suffered a stroke, there was uncertainty as to whether he could continue to write. The play that premiered immediately after his stroke, If I Were You, had been written before his illness; the first play written afterwards, Life and Beth, premiered in the summer of 2008. 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 2009.
Ayckbourn continues to experiment with theatrical form. The play Roundelay opened in September 2014; 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 120 possible permutations. In Arrivals and Departures, the first half of the play is told from the point of view of one character, only for the second half to dramatise the same events from the point of view of another.
Many of Ayckbourn's plays, including Private Fears in Public Places, Intimate Exchanges, My Wonderful Day and Neighbourhood Watch, have had their New York premiere at 59E59 Theaters as part of the annual Brits Off Broadway Festival.
In 2019, 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 2020 play, Anno Domino, was recorded as a radio production, with Ayckbourn and his wife Heather playing all the roles. Similarly, Ayckbourn's Covid-period 2021 play, The Girl Next Door, was streamed online and made available behind a paywall on the Stephen Joseph Theatre's website.
In 2022, 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.