Modern British Authors [antikvár]

Alan Ayckboum Alan Ayckbourn was born in 1939 and educated at Haileybury. He has worked in the theatre since leaving school and has been a stage manager and actor at Edinburgh, Worthing, Leatherhead, Oxford, and with the late Stephen Joseph's Theatre-in-the Round Company at Scarborough. He was a founder member of the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, and BBC Radio Drama Producer in Leeds from 1964 to 1970. He is now Director of Productions of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough. Since 1959 he has written numerous full-length plays, mainly for the Scarborough Theatre-in-the-Round. His London productions include Relatively Speaking (1967), of which there have also been fifty-one productions in Germany alone; How the Other Half Loves (1970), starring Robert Morley, which ran for over two years. Time and Time Again (1972),' Absurd Person Singular (1973), which received the Evening Standard Best Comedy Award; Absent Friends (1975); Jeeves, a musical, written in collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber (1975); Confusions (1976), Bedroom Farce (National Theatre, 1977); Just Between Ourselves (1977), winner of the Evening Standard Best Play Award; Ten Times Table (1978); Joking Apart (1979), which received the Plays and Players Award; Sisterly Feelings (National Theatre, 1980); Taking Steps (1980), and Season's Greetings (1982). The Norman Conquests (London, 1974), the comic trilogy, won the Evening Standard Drama Award for the Best Play of the Year, the Plays and Players Award, and the Variety Club of Great Britain voted him playwright of the year. Alan Ayckbourn's plays have been translated into twenty-four languages and performed all over the world. Absurd Person Singular is a play for three men and three women. We visit three couples in their three kitchens on the Christmas Eves of three successive years. First the "lower-class" but very much up-and-coming Hopcrofts in their bright new-pin, gadget-filled kitchen - anxiously giving a little party to their bank manager and his wife, and an architect neighbour. Then, the architect and his wife in their neglected untidy flat. Lastly, the bank manager and his wife in their large, slightly modernized, old-Victorian style kitchen. Running like a darker thread through the wild comedy of behind-the-scenes disasters at Christmas parties is the story of the advance of the Hopcrofts to material prosperity and independence - and the decline of the others. In the final stages the little man is well and truly on top, with the others, literally and unnervingly, dancing to his tune.