Friday 9 January 2009

 

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Ayckbourn’s unflinching gaze

Wednesday, 24th September 2008

Veronica Lee profiles the playwright as the Old Vic revives his best-known work

Ayckbourn settled in Scarborough after an itinerant life as an actor and stage manager. He was born in London to a novelist mother and musician father and attended Haileybury. While working at the Library Theatre (of which he became artistic director in 1972) he started writing and his first major hit was in 1967 with Relatively Speaking; almost half his plays have been performed either in the West End or at the National Theatre, and many on Broadway. He was knighted in 1997.

The writer had a major stroke in early 2006 but his output is undiminished. His latest play, Life and Beth, was premiered this summer at Scarborough and his current revival of Woman in Mind will be the last of his works performed there before Chris Monks take the helm next year. Monks has commissioned Ayckbourn’s 73rd play, which will be premiered in 2009.

Warchus hopes that the Old Vic production will mark the point where The Norman Conquests is rightly considered a modern classic. ‘These plays are a marvellous snapshot of 1973 but watching them, you are struck by how little has changed.’

And how: the playwright rarely refers to contemporary events in his work, but the trilogy mentions oil prices, a government in trouble, terrorism, dodgy weather patterns and a sinking British economy. Who knew Alan Ayckbourn was a soothsayer?

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