Ayckbourn’s unflinching gaze

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). Swear words are used minimally (but always to maximum effect when they are), there’s no simulated sex on stage (although it is much talked about by his often lustful and/or frustrated characters), and the only bloodletting on stage is emotional rather than literal. In short, he writes about the lives and loves of the middle classes — and we all know how that plays in lefty luvviedom.

But a major revival of his best-known work, The Norman Conquests, at the Old Vic in London (previewing now and opening 6 October), should serve to remind us why Ayckbourn is one of our greatest living playwrights. So keen was the Old Vic’s artistic director Kevin Spacey to stage the work that he agreed to reconfigure the auditorium into a theatre in the round, like the Library Theatre (now the Stephen Joseph) in Scarborough, for which it was originally written.