How Many Plays Has Alan Ayckbourn Written?

It's a frequently asked question of Alan Ayckbourn's Official Website, just how many plays has Alan Ayckbourn written?
The playwright's preferred answer is along the lines of, 'what does it matter?'; after all we don't generally feel the need to number the latest novel from prolific authors such as, say, Stephen King.
However, as the question repeatedly crops up throughout the playwright's career - and seems to have come up a number of times this summer - it is worth setting the record straight.
As of 23 September 2016, Alan Ayckbourn has officially written - and had produced - 80 plays.
This number represents the playwright's official full-length play canon carried by his official website www.alanayckbourn.net and agreed with the playwright himself.
In addition to these 80 plays, he has also written 11 revues, 5 one act plays, 5 adaptations, 1 screenplay, 1 narrative for voices, 1 book and a number of other miscellaneous works.
The official play list can be found below (click on a title to learn more about the play from Alan Ayckbourn's Official Website).

1959   The Square Cat (01)
1959   Love After All (02)
1960   Dad's Tale (03)
1961   Standing Room Only (04)
1962   Christmas V Mastermind (05)
1963   Mr Whatnot (06)
1965   Relatively Speaking (07)
1967   The Sparrow (08)
1969   How The Other Half Loves (09)
1970   Family Circles (10)
1971   Time And Time Again (11)
1972   Absurd Person Singular (12)
1973   Table Manners (13)
1973   Living Together (14)
1973   Round & Round The Garden (15)
1974   Absent Friends (16)
1974   Confusions (17)
1975   Jeeves / By Jeeves (18)
1975   Bedroom Farce (19)
1976   Just Between Ourselves (20)
1977   Ten Times Table (21)
1978   Joking Apart (22)
1979   Sisterly Feelings (23)
1979   Taking Steps (24)
1980   Suburban Strains (25)
1980   Season’s Greetings (26)
1981   Way Upstream (27)
1981   Making Tracks (28)
1982   Intimate Exchanges (29)
1983   It Could Be Any One Of Us (30)
1984   A Chorus Of Disapproval (31)
1985   Woman In Mind (32)
1987   A Small Family Business (33)
1987   Henceforward... (34) 
1988   Man Of The Moment (35)
1988   Mr. A’s Amazing Maze Plays (36)
1989   The Revengers’ Comedies (37)
1989   Invisible Friends (38)
1990   Body Language (39)
1990   This Is Where We Came In (40) 
1990   Callisto 5 / Callisto#7 (41) 
1991   Wildest Dreams (42)
1991   My Very Own Story (43)
1992   Time Of My Life (44)
1992   Dreams From A Summer House (45)
1994   Communicating Doors (46)
1994   Haunting Julia (47)
1994   The Musical Jigsaw Play (48)
1995   A Word From Our Sponsor (49)
1996   The Champion Of Paribanou (50)
1997   Things We Do For Love (51)
1998   Comic Potential (52)
1998   The Boy Who Fell Into A Book (53)
1999   House (54)
1999   Garden (55)
2000   Virtual Reality (56)
2000   Whenever (57)
2001   GamePlan (58)
2001   FlatSpin (59)
2001   RolePlay (60)
2002   Snake In The Grass (61)
2002   The Jollies (62)
2003   Sugar Daddies (63)
2003   Orvin - Champion Of Champions (64)
2003   My Sister Sadie (65) 
2004   Drowning On Dry Land (66)
2004   Private Fears In Public Places (67)
2004   Miss Yesterday (68)
2005   Improbable Fiction (69)
2006   If I Were You (70)
2008   Life & Beth (71)
2008   Awaking Beauty (72)
2009   My Wonderful Day (73)
2010   Life Of Riley (74)
2011   Neighbourhood Watch (75)
2012   Surprises (76)
2013   Arrivals & Departures (77)
2014   Roundelay (78)
2015   Hero’s Welcome (79)
2016   Consuming Passions (80)

Of course, an official list often raises even more frequently asked questions, many of which you can find answered at Alan Ayckbourn's Official Website in the FAQs section by clicking here.
But if you're wondering why this year's plays are - or are not - in the list. Here's the quick answer. The Karaoke Theatre Company is not considered by the playwright to be one of his full-length plays because so much of the script is improvised on a nightly basis. The playwright estimates that at least half of the play may differ on any one night, which means there can never be a definitive text for the whole piece, only a guide.
As for Consuming Passions, the playwright considers this to be his 80th play. Although having two named parts - initially presented separately but now being performed together - it follows in the footsteps of The Revengers' Comedies in being considered a single play in two parts which can be performed separately or preferably together in which one continuous narrative is told in one space (as opposed to, say, House & Garden, which consists of two plays designed to be performed in two different spaces simultaneously with each other).
You can find a full index of everything Alan Ayckbourn has written at his official website by clicking here, from which list you can click on a title to find further details of every work created by the playwright since he began writing.
If you're still having trouble reconciling why a play may or may not be in the official list or why it's listed the way it is, it's probably best to heed the playwright's own advice at the start of this article and ask yourself, does it really matter anyway?
Just enjoy the plays.

Alan Ayckbourn's Karaoke Theatre Company and Consuming Passions can be seen in repertory at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until 8 October. Visit www.sjt.uk.com for more details and to book tickets.

The Michael T. Mooney Archive

Alan Ayckbourn’s Official Website is delighted to announce it is collaborating with one of the world’s largest private collections of Alan Ayckbourn material.
Michael T Mooney, a devotee of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays, has been collecting material relating to Alan Ayckbourn’s entire career for more than two decades and he has given the website access to the extensive collection prior to it becoming part of Alan Ayckbourn's Archive.

Simon Murgatroyd, Administrator for Alan Ayckbourn’s Website and Archivist to the playwright, said he was delighted at the decision to move to the archive to the UK.
“I have known Michael for 15 years and I believe he has amassed one of the most significant private collections of material relating to Alan Ayckbourn in the world. Just opening the first box, there were discoveries relating to productions directed by Alan Ayckbourn of which there are no other records of. It is an extraordinary collection and I’m grateful to have the chance to work with it and share my discoveries on www.alanayckbourn.net."
Michael, who is based in New Jersey, first encountered Alan Ayckbourn’s plays through the television adaption of The Norman Conquests in the late 1970s. He went on to direct Ayckbourn plays - including several North American premieres - and has also acted as an Ayckbourn dramaturge for several companies. He has participated in several events involving the playwright in his home-town and has met the playwright on many occasions, most recently with his visit to the 59E59 Theaters in New York with the acclaimed productions of Hero’s Welcome and Confusions.

Of the donation of the archive, Michael said: “I was worried that if something should happen to me all of these items would probably go in a dumpster! After all, there are so few of us who value these things that it would be unlikely that they found a good home. I’ve been looking to divest myself of lots of “things” lately - and donating it all to the Ayckbourn Archive seemed the ideal solution!”
Michael, whose favourite Ayckbourn plays include The Norman Conquests, Family Circles and Body Language, believes Alan Ayckbourn is a playwright special for many reasons.
 “As a person who has been involved in the theatre all his life, I think Alan Ayckbourn is one of the most brilliant playmakers of our time. He challenges the dramatic form and the theatre-going experience, making it exciting to go see a play. He also manages to create real characters in relatable situations - no matter where you live, or what your domestic situation. As a director and playwright myself, I admire his economy of word - sometimes gaining the biggest laugh or tear with a single syllable. Lastly, it is most gratifying to appreciate the breadth of his work - ever changing over the last six decades - the mark of a true genius.”
The collection, which runs into thousands of pieces, includes programmes, flyers, cuttings, posters and other Ayckbourn ephemera covering Alan Ayckbourn’s entire career from his acting days during the late 1950s and early 1960s through his famed playwriting and directing career. It will be called The Michael T. Mooney Archive and, once collated, will eventually be placed within The Ayckbourn Archive at the University Of York with some rarer pieces relating to the playwright's home theatre, the Stephen Joseph Theatre, going into The Bob Watson Archive at the venue.

Of the collection, Michael is hard-pressed to name a favourite item, but thinks is a fan of the very rare - and obscure!
“The best collectibles are the ones that even the Alan Ayckbourn archive didn’t have! I found a rare copy of the long playing record of Cinderella’s Star Night, a 1982 charity panto that featured Ian McKellen reading a poem by Ayckbourn. Another rare find was a handbill from 1975’s Jeeves that billed Betty Marsden as Aunt Dahlia, who was written out of the production prior to opening night! It’s also fun to discover foreign language collectibles.”
Material drawn from The Michael T. Mooney Archive will be added to www.alanayckbourn.net over the coming months and particularly notable items will be featured in a new regular feature on The Alan Ayckbourn News Blog.
You can find details of The Michael T. Mooney Archive and other Ayckbourn collections at Alan Ayckbourn's Official Website by clicking here.

Kings of New York

Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre company has returned to the UK triumphant after a five-week off-Broadway residency in New York which saw them chosen as a critics’ pick in The New York Times and highly praised by The Wall Street Journal.
The SJT company took two shows, a revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1974 Confusions and his 2015 world premiere, Hero’s Welcome, to the annual Brits Off Broadway festival at New York’s 59E59 Theater - both shows had been part of last year’s summer season at the Scarborough Theatre, which marked the 60th anniversary of the Stephen Joseph Theatre - the New York trip, during which they could be seen at 59E59 between 27 May and 3 July, brought those celebrations to a close.

The two shows broke their box office targets, and were highly praised by the New York media.
New York Times critic Ben Brantley highlighted both plays in his ‘NYT Critics’ Pick’ feature, saying of Hero’s Welcome: “So deft is Mr Ayckbourn’s dramatic shorthand that he can summon complete, quirkily detailed back stories for not one but three intersecting couples in a single, standard-length play. He manages to do so while engineering an elaborate plot, as full of twists and secrets as anything by Ibsen, in which everybody lies, including the British government.”
Of Confusions, he wrote: “These five one-acters also allow you to see clearly the basic building blocks from which Mr Ayckbourn constructs his more complex works. And even the silliest of them is steeped in the critical yet compassionate sensibility - call it sentimental cynicism - that is uniquely their creator’s.”
Meanwhile The Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout praised the ‘poignant drama’ of Hero’s Welcome, and the humour of Confusions, saying: “In recent seasons 59E59 Theater’s Brits Off Broadway summer festival has been doing theater-loving New Yorkers a signal service by importing Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre, which Mr Ayckbourn ran for 37 years, to perform his stagings of his own plays.”

He added: “This year’s fare includes the US premiere of Hero’s Welcome, his 79th play, and the New York premiere of Confusions, a 1974 mixed bill of interconnected one-act plays. Both are musts: Confusions is funnier than just about anything else to be seen on a New York stage right now, while Hero’s Welcome is one of the most poignant dramas that Mr Ayckbourn has given us.
“Has there ever been a playwright who directed his own works more skillfully and imaginatively? I doubt it.”
Hero’s Welcome and Confusions were performed in New York by the original Scarborough company: Stephen Billington, Elizabeth Boag, Russell Dixon, and Richard Stacey, plus, replacing original cast members Terenia Edwards and Emma Manton, who were unavailable for the New York tour, Evelyn Hoskins and Charlotte Harwood.
Alan Ayckbourn’s long association with the Stephen Joseph Theatre continues this summer. His new show, The Karaoke Theatre Company, previews in the Round from 8 July and plays in rep until 7 October, while his revival of the 1987 Evening Standard Best Comedy Award-winning Henceforward… can be see in the Round in rep from 8 September to 8 October.
Meanwhile, his brand new play Consuming Passions can be seen as single acts or together at lunchtimes and in the evenings in the theatre’s Bistro and McCarthy Theatre on various dates from 5 August to 8 October. For further information and dates, please visit www.sjt.uk.com

Alan Ayckbourn & Brits Off Broadway

To mark the North American premiere of Alan Ayckbourn's Hero's Welcome and the New York premiere of Confusions at the 59E59 Theaters as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, the blog presents an updated article about the playwright and his relationship with the festival.

There's a Hero's Welcome in New York at the moment as Alan Ayckbourn and the Stephen Joseph Theatre company return to the 59E59 Theaters for the sixth time.
Last week saw the Scarborough company returning to what can now well be considered its New York home, for a five week residency at the Brits Off Broadway festival. The festival will see the North American premiere of Hero's Welcome with the same company appearing in the New York premiere of the classic 1974 play Confusions.

In the past eleven years, Alan’s plays have become a regular fixture of the Brits Off Broadway festival proving to be successes for both the playwright and the 59E59 Theaters.
Yet prior to 2005, Alan’s plays had had very little impact in New York and truth be told, it had been more than thirty years since his one bona fide Broadway hit.
In 1974, Absurd Person Singular opened in New York at the Music Box Theatre, directed by the London production’s director Eric Thompson, and would go on to break the record for the longest running comedy on Broadway by a British playwright.
Theoretically, the floodgates should have opened with this leading to even more success, in the same way Absurd Person Singular led to success upon success in the West End.
But it didn’t. The Norman Conquests performed unexceptionally on Broadway in 1975 and although there were subsequent successful Ayckbourn productions in New York such as the National Theatre’s tour of Bedroom Farce in 1979 and The Old Vic’s transfer of The Norman Conquests in 2009, most failed to have any major or lasting impact.
So there was no reason to believe that touring his most recent play from the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough to a small off-Broadway festival in 2005 was going to make any sort of waves.
Yet when Private Fears In Public Places opened at the Brits Off Broadway festival, it was met with some of the most extraordinary reviews of the playwright’s career, including an astonishing critique from the New York Times, which amongst many plaudits spotlighted the  “first-rate, frill-free acting” of Alan’s company.
Box office records at the 59E59 Theaters were broken and Alan noted, ”Seats were at a premium. The little box office wasn’t used to the lines around the block.” [1]
The company of six actors were compared to many of the Broadway heavyweights and at the end of the year the production featured in a host of top ten theatre lists including the New York Times and Times magazine. The production also garnered an Outstanding Director nomination at the Drama Desk Awards.
For Alan, it was an unexpected and extraordinary response to the play.
“It was a sort of vindication, like a life’s work unwasted. You slog away doing what you hope is good work up in the north-east but you never really know. But to be put up against that level of competition, in that sort of cauldron of critical mayhem which I have experienced over time... In New York the knives are very long indeed when they’re long. If you’ve got a failure in New York, try to get the firtst plane out.
“I wasn’t prepared for anything like the response.” [1]
The success of Private Fears In Public Places was not only a surprise to Alan though, the 59E59 itself was stunned by its success. The venue's President and Artistic Director Elysabeth Kleinhans was both delighted and surprised by just how much enthusiasm greeted the production.
"When I first met Sir Alan in 2004 and we agreed that the Stephen Joseph Theatre would participate in our Festival, I had no idea that we were building such a wonderful and lasting relationship. The success of Private Fears in Public Places in 2005 was, in hindsight, inevitable, but prospectively, none of us expected the response we had.  Our theater had only been open a bit more than a year and we were completely surprised on the morning of the New York Times review to find a line outside the door prior to the box office opening." [2]
The success of Private Fears In Public Places made a return visit to the Brits Off Broadway festival practically inevitable and Alan had already mentioned he was keen on returning in a couple of years time.
What wasn’t inevitable was that less than a year after returning to work from his stroke in 2006, he would take one of his most challenging and ambitious works across the Atlantic.
His revival of Intimate Exchanges was an epic experience for any venue; two actors playing 10 roles in a branching play with 16 possible permutations and more than 30 hours of dialogue in total.
This play was taken over to New York in its entirety. The complexity of the play posed a challenge for 59E59 Theaters and a few pleasant surprises. When interviewed about the production, Elysabeth Kleinhans noted how initially packages to see the different permutations were not offered and had to be created due to public demand.
“Who’s going to see all those plays in five weeks,” she said. “It’s ridiculous, right? I’m an optimist, but I never expected this.” [3]
Reviews again proved to be extremely favorable and it received Drama Desk nominations for Outstanding Play and for Outstanding Actor for Bill Champion. Time Magazine once again naming it as one of the top ten productions of the year.
Alan Ayckbourn’s plays were finally getting the recognition they deserved on the New York stage aided, it was regularly observed, by the quality of Alan’s acting company.
For Alan, the festival also finally meant being able to visit New York on his own terms. One of the appeals of the 59E59 to him is the small scale of the venue and the fact the festival welcomes his production with his company.
“It’s the sort of theater I recognize and am happy with,” noted Alan in 2009. “I would be far less happy a few blocks down in a big Broadway theater. As unhappy as I would be in London on the West End.”[4]
2009 brought with it the third visit to the festival, following in the wake of the high profile transfer of The Old Vic’s acclaimed 2008 production of The Norman Conquests to the Circle In The Square theatre. This was arguably the most successful Broadway Ayckbourn production since Absurd Person Singular and was showered with major awards including the first Tony award for an Ayckbourn play.
In direct contrast to the large three-play scale and fame of The Norman Conquests, Alan brought his latest, understated play to Brits Off Broadway with My Wonderful Day. This day observed through the eyes of a mostly silent nine year old schoolgirl was again tremendously successful, receiving excellent reviews and garnering Drama Desk nominations for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Actress for 28 year old Ayesha Antoine’s performance as nine year old Winnie.
Two years later, Alan Ayckbourn returned to Brits Off Broadway with his latest play, Neighbourhood Watch, which over the course of a year had runs in Scarborough, New York and London as well as throughout the UK. It was also the year Alan emphasised why the visits to the 59E59 and New York had become so significant to him.
“We take a show from Scarborough to New York with the same company and the same production and it gets fantastic reviews. When we there with My Wonderful Day in 2009, people were screaming out of their minds with praise and that is good for Scarborough and the theatre. It gives the company, not to say me, a little shot in the arm occasionally.”[5]
There is no doubt the success of Alan’s productions at the festival have been instrumental in increasing the awareness and appreciation of his plays in New York and the USA. It’s also hard not to believe too that their success was not also a key part in the decision to award Alan the prestigious Special Tony Award For Lifetime Achievement in Theatre in 2010.
After a three year break, the most ambitious visit yet took place in 2014 with a season called the Ayckbourn Ensemble which featured the world premiere productions of Arrivals & Departures and Farcicals as well as a revival of Time Of My Life. The response again was overwhelming with both new and classic plays receiving praise from critics and audiences alike.
Now all eyes are on the 59E59 Theaters to see whether Hero's Welcome and Confusions will follow in the same successful steps as their predecessors. It seems very likely given the extraordinary response and welcome New York audiences have given the company in the past.
Although one suspects to Alan, this is far less important than the opportunity the Brits Off Broadway offers to present his work on  the New York stage as he intends it to be seen with the spotlight thrown on the play and his actors and the quality of their work.

Hero's Welcome and Confusions can be seen at the 59E59 Theaters until 3 July. Visit www.britsoffbroadway.com for more details.

[1] Interview with Louise Jury, 6 January 2006, The Independent
[2] Interview with Simon Murgatroyd, Alan Ayckbourn's Official Website, October 2011
[3] Interview with Mark Blakenship, 27 May 2007, New York Times
[4] Interview with David Cote, 18 November 2009, Time Out
[5] Interview with Simon Murgatroyd, June 2011