If you have a question regarding any aspect of Alan's work, email it to: ayckbourn@gmail.com (labelled Ask The Archivist) and we'll publish any interesting questions.
Question: In Paul Allen's biography of Alan Ayckbourn, Grinning At The Edge, he mentions Alan wrote several plays before his first professionally commissioned play The Square Cat. Do any of these survive and what is the oldest surviving Ayckbourn play?
Answer: The Square Cat is regarded as Alan Ayckbourn's first play - largely because it was his first professional commission and the first of his plays to be performed. However, prior to that Alan had been writing during his teenage years and had shown a number of these plays to Stephen Joseph; his mentor at Scarborough's Library Theatre, Stephen Joseph.
Depending on which interviews you read with Alan concerning these plays, there were between nine and a dozen plays written between the start of his professional acting career in 1956, aged 17, and the premiere of The Square Cat in 1959. These are known to include plays inspired by both Pirandello and Ionesco, but details of the rest remain vague at best.
In the Ayckbourn Archive at the Borthwick Institute at the University Of York, there are several manuscripts which have confidently been dated as being written prior to or in the immediate aftermath of The Square Cat. These are one act plays which have never been produced or published and are: The Season; The Party Game; Relative Values; Mind Over Murder.
Details on all these plays are sketchy at best as the playwright has little memory of writing them, but - with the possible exception of Mind Over Murder - there is no reason to doubt these were part of the dozen pre-professional plays. Of these, following research by Alan's Archivist and consultation with the playwright, the most likely contender for the earliest surviving play is The Season. This is a play in four scenes (for each season) which sees a young girl and a mysterious Traveller meeting and falling in love but moving forward in time with each scene from medieval times to a post-apocalyptic landscape. There may well have been plays preceding The Season, but unfortunately all record of them has been lost.
To submit your question to Ask The Archivist, email Simon Murgatroyd at: ayckbourn@gmail.com labelled Ask The Archivist.
