Ask The Archivist is a regular feature allowing you to put your Alan Ayckbourn related questions to the playwright's archivist Simon Murgatroyd.
If you have a question regarding any aspect of Alan's work, email it to: ask@alanayckbourn.net and we'll publish any interesting questions.
Question: Whilst reading the original reviews of Absent Friends (and several other plays from the '70s), I noticed the number of his plays is frequently reported incorrectly. Why?
If you have a question regarding any aspect of Alan's work, email it to: ask@alanayckbourn.net and we'll publish any interesting questions.
Question: Whilst reading the original reviews of Absent Friends (and several other plays from the '70s), I noticed the number of his plays is frequently reported incorrectly. Why?
Answer: The simple answer is that for many years Alan Ayckbourn didn't include Jeeves amongst his list of plays (in all likelihood this was due to it being a musical, rather than him wanting to forget the entire experience of the flop musical!). This led to many media articles giving the wrong number of plays (i.e. that Absent Friends was Alan's 15th rather than 16th play).
It was only during the 1990s that Alan decided - again presumably because by then he had written other musicals which were included in the list - to include Jeeves in the list of plays.
To extrapolate further, there wasn't a definitive, easily accessible Ayckbourn play-list to all intents and purposes until www.alanayckbourn.net was launched in 2002. Prior to that, there were often discrepancies between how many plays there were and how they were numbered.
For instance, between 1965 and 1971, it's not unusual for many of Alan's earliest plays not to be counted in media reports. Between 1975 and the early 1980s, quite frequently Jeeves is excluded from the list, presumably as it was a musical and Alan hadn't written any other musicals at that point. This means that what was regarded as his silver anniversary play, Season's Greetings - which was marked by a silver programme cover - in 1982, is actually now regarded as his 26th play (one wonders if future generations will ponder why a 26th play was deemed worthy of a silver cover rather than the 25th!).
The first published authoritative list of Alan's plays was compiled by the Stephen Joseph Theatre's press and marketing manager Jeannie Swales and Alan's PA Heather Stoney in 1999 for the A Chorus Of Approval event at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, to mark the playwright's 60th birthday. This list formed the basis of the definitive play list which is used today and can be found on Alan Ayckbourn's website here.
To submit your question to Ask The Archivist, email Simon Murgatroyd at: ask@alanayckbourn.net.
