Veronica Lee profiles the playwright as the Old Vic revives his best-known work
Alan Ayckbourn, so theatre lore has it, is the second-most performed British playwright after Shakespeare. So why has he become so unfashionable among theatre cognoscenti?
Partly, it’s his own doing. In 2002, disillusioned by the musical-laden, drama-free territory it had become and despite his many successes there throughout his career, he announced a West End hiatus on his work (only recently ended for a revival of Absurd Person Singular with Jane Horrocks). Plus, he insists on premiering all his new work in his beloved home town of Scarborough. And two of his tropes — complicated plotlines and sets that require pinpoint timing of entrances and exits — might lead some more foolish commentators to describe him as the thinking man’s Ray Cooney.
Mostly, though, it’s because Ayckbourn, 69, is no shockmeister in the style of the late Sarah Kane (third on that list, by the way).
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