60 Years At The SJT: 1989

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1989
In 1989, Alan Ayckbourn celebrated his 50th birthday and the 30th anniversary of his professional playwriting debut at the Library Theatre in Scarborough.
He had been Artistic Director of the company for 17 years by this point and been associated with the company for 32 years.
It was a time, he felt, to celebrate by doing something audacious and new. As a result, he came up with a plan to create an epic, two-part, five-hour play called The Revengers' Comedies.

"I've made it to 50, so I thought I'd give people a present. You can't have an 'event' every year, or they become ordinary - but every two or three years, I like to do something a bit different like The Norman Conquests, or Intimate Exchanges. This one is a bit of an epic."

It had actually been 17 years since Intimate Exchanges and although there had been big plays such as Way Upstream, A Chorus Of Disapproval and Man Of The Moment - they were not at the time advertised or regarded as an 'event' play in the way The Revengers' Comedies, Intimate Exchanges or, later, House & Garden, would be.

It also marked a notable change of direction for the playwright. His plays during the latter part of the 1980s are frequently regarded as Alan tackling the state of the nation from Woman In Mind to A Small Family Business, Henceforward... to Man Of The Moment. The Revengers' Comedies was something entirely different though, not just epic, but created for a far more suitable anniversary reason.

"I wrote it for fun, really. I was suddenly aware that everyone was asking me, 'What issue are you going to address with this play?' And I don't want to address an issue. I want to tell a story; I want to write a good thriller, which is sort of unfashionable now. Nobody ever asked what issues Alfred Hitchcock addressed. He just addressed the idea of scaring you."

The play paid homage to Alan's great love as a child and young man - cinema. Alan had not been raised as a theatre-goer, but was obsessive about cinema; indeed throughout this career, many of his most significant influences are cinematic as opposed to theatrical.
Here Alan wanted to create a film on stage, cinematic in scope with more than 20 characters and sudden shifts of location from the city to the country.
It's most singular influence was the classic revenge movie Strangers On A Train and whilst the title suggest there was a particular theatrical influence, this was not the case.

"I have never read The Revenger's Tragedy though obviously the title was the inspiration for The Revengers' Comedies. John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's A Whore which I directed at the National Theatre in 1989 was the play that most influenced me. It was my first foray into directing Edwardian drama and I was thrilled by the knife edge quality of the writing - the comic paralleling the tragic throughout the work. That exciting dark / light balance was lost for a long time - certainly in English drama - after that period. I wanted to write an equivalent play on a grand scale set in the present day. If there are links, well and good, for that was my intention - certainly as regards construction and balance of emotion. Of course the initial premise of swapped revenges I borrowed shamelessly from the classic film Strangers On A Train."

The play concerns a recently made redundant city executive and a rich, upper-class country-set who has been crossed in love. She, Karen, persuades Henry Bell that revenge is the only possible solution to their problems and that by swapping their revenges, they can find the closure they need.
It obviously does not go to plan.
Henry falls in love with the woman he's meant to be taking his revenge against whilst Karen proves to be psychotic and terrifyingly efficient as she ruthlessly dispatches all in her way at Henry's former company.

"I wanted to write a play about a man who picks up a stray kitten and finds it's a boa constrictor instead.... My alter ego Karen is completely off her trolley. In theatre, there's humour between the cracks of the horror. I'm fascinated by treading that razor-blade."

"I just think revenge is a terribly strong emotion, it's a dangerous emotion, it's as strong as love. It's based on love which turns to hate. It's obsessive, it refuses to see reason. The revenge of normal people lasts about 20 minutes. You have an instinctive fury about what someone's done to you, but with most of us, thank God, the emotion passes. Otherwise there would be very few people left alive. This play is about somebody who doesn't let it go, who actually manufactures it, who enjoys it. I've never had any desire for revenge, but I have a tremendously fiery temper, particularly when I was a child... In order to write plays, you have to have quite a bit of anger... You use anger as a motor and from writing you sometimes find peace with the world."

Once written, it became obvious the play was to pose a huge challenge to the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round on practically every level. Helping meet this challenge was what would become for many years the quintessential Ayckbourn team. The playwright directing with Roger Glossop designing and Mick Hughes lighting. Whilst Alan had worked with both previously in London, this was the first time he had brought them to Scarborough to all work together. It would not be the last time.
With a relatively restrictive budget need to create a cinematic epic on stage, Roger and Mick ingeniously solved Alan's technical challenges with a minimum of props, using light and a versatile pulley system to allow the action to move seamlessly and quickly from one location to the next as the play with its short, fast-moving, location-hopping scenes required.
The play featured a cast of 14, the largest yet seen in an Ayckbourn play in Scarborough, and the publicity department was tasked with making this a major theatrical and celebratory event. To this end, a decision was made to run the play in its entirety every Saturday with the two parts split by a break for tea, which could be taken - picnic-style in the grounds of the former school now theatre.
An event it certainly became and proved to be a huge success for the theatre and drew attention from around the world. It is fair to say, that this was the point that the Stephen Joseph In The Round's profile was at its highest and that aside from the eponymous Fair, Alan and the theatre had become the one thing which was most related to the town around the world.

The most notable attention came from one of the world's most famous theatre critics when Frank Rich of the New York Times - the 'Butcher of Broadway' - came to Scarborough to see The Revengers' Comedies and acclaimed it and the theatre for its vision; the publicity department noted this led to a substantial increase in visitors from abroad and a result.

"It is hard to speak highly enough of a work whose elegant writing and staging is accompanied by an utter lack of pretension. Mr. Ayckbourn would as soon make reference to the Everly Brothers' song Cathy's Clown as to Cyril Tourneur's Jacobean Revenger's Tragedy. That's in keeping with a writer who chooses to work on a small stage in a small town but whose talent and theatrical ambitions increasingly seem without limit."
Frank Rich, The New York Times

The Revengers' Comedies succeeded in Scarborough where it did not in the West End. The need to see a play over two nights or for the better part of a day, worked in the repertory theatre of a small town, but failed to transfer to well to London. It became one of the final nails in the playwright's relationship with London and the complete realisation that his work there could rarely if ever reach the peaks of performance and staging it attained in his home theatre.
Although even Alan came away from that summer in Scarborough exhausted....

"I intend The Revengers' Comedies as a sort of fiftieth birthday present. I can’t think who on Earth the present is aimed at. Certainly not myself - the thing is a technical nightmare and puts years on me. In two halves, four parts, thirty scenes, playing time well over four hours, often on a single day with Glyndebourne style intervals. We all lose a lot of weight this summer. I eat a lot of cold salmon."

60 Years At The SJT: 1988

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1988
Between 1986 and 1988, Alan Ayckbourn had taken a sabbatical from the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough, to become a company director at the National Theatre.
It had been an enormously successful period for Alan and he returned to Scarborough revitalised and ready to move the theatre forward; the year would see him notably write and direct the incredibly ambitious Man Of The Moment - which memorably featured a swimming pool as part of the set.
Yet much of the year at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round was dominated by the fallout from an administrative conflict between the theatre manager, Ian Watson, and the publicity officer, Russ Allen.
Over the course of the year during which Ian Watson left the theatre in January and Russ Allen in December, an increasingly vitriolic spat was played out in the pages of the national media including The Stage newspaper and Private Eye.
Alan resumed work as Artistic Director of the theatre in June, slap bang in the middle of controversy as it spilled into the national eye. It was obviously not what Alan hoped the focus would be on during his triumphant return to the theatre, but it also intriguingly included the strange case of a lost play.
During the summer of 1988, Alan was scheduled to direct a new play by Peter Tinniswood called State Of The Union; Peter already had a good relationship with the theatre following the success of his plays You Should See Us Now (1981) and At The End Of The Day (1983).
State Of The Union was advertised in the summer 1988 brochure as to be directed by Alan Ayckbourn and featuring the return of a popular playwright to the theatre.

"The prolific author, playwright and radio dramatist Peter Tinniswood returns to the Stephen Joseph Theatre with a brand new comedy which re-unites the Ayckbourn / Tinniswood director / author axis which so delighted audiences in past seasons with productions of You Should See Us Now (1981) and At The End Of The Day (1983). Warwick is a man in the middle of unions. As publicity officer for a small northern seaside watering town he has arranged Hallam-on-Sands' first ever trades [sic] union conference. It is no coincidence that the President of the Union is Warwick's father-in-law. Nor is it a secret that Warwick's own union with his wife Brenda is, like Hallam-on-Sands itself, rather gracious and run down - after 15 years of marriage, two dogs and disputes over where to live. Brenda's mum and dad aren't too happy either. And then there's the two dogs..."

And that is all we know of the play. It was later withdrawn from the summer season schedule with no public announcement and there is no documentation held in archive about why it was replaced. The only clue - and the likely reason - is an interview with Alan in the Yorkshire Evening Press in which it notes the play, like Stephen Mallatratt's withdrawn play Wonderland from the previous year, was simply not ready and had to be replaced in the schedule.

But this was not before State Of The Union fed into the Watson / Allen controversy as revealed by The Stage newspaper on 16 June 1988 (click on image to enlarge).

The Stage report of problems at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In
The Round, including the State Of The Union flyers issue.
Copyright: The Stage Media Company Ltd.

The report alleges that the theatre lost £2,000 when a flyer was discovered to have revealed "the top secret burglar alarm system number linked to the police station."

Intriguingly, this flyer was a key part part of the advertising for State Of The Union - although no-one would never likely have known this to be the case.

For the promotion of State Of The Union included a campaign for the previously mentioned fake holiday resort of Hallam-On-Sands. Except nowhere on the flyer does it indicate the town is fictional nor has any connection to a forthcoming play; it's not even a clever piece of early viral marketing as there is no way to contact the theatre - the number displayed was an outgoing only line.

The flyer has not been seen since 1988 and is reprinted below for the first time then and clearly illustrates a very strange marketing campaign (click on images to enlarge). 

The State Of The Union flyer (click to enlarge)
Copyright: Scarborough Theatre Trust

The Stephen Joseph Theatre Archive also contains an early mock-up of the proposed programme cover for the play; sadly the quality is very poor as it was sent via fax, which present a great problem to archives today given how quickly they fade.

Copyright: Scarborough Theatre Trust

With regard to The Stage's accusations, an internal investigation by the theatre revealed: "The cost of the posters was £200 [not £2,000]. The poster did give the security number but this does not now pose a security threat as the telephone line no longer accepts incoming calls, as is usual with security lines."

A piece of correspondence held in archive from Russ Allen suggests State Of The Union was withdrawn to be produced in a future season at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, but it was never produced and Peter Tinniswood's next play at the venue would be in 1991 with The Village Fete, an adaptation of his acclaimed and popular radio plays.

All this marked a strange chapter in the life of the SJT. State Of The Union is one of only six publicly announced plays from the theatre between 1955 and the present day which were not produced and the Allen / Watson controversy is the only in-house controversy to have gone public.
All this whilst Alan was looking to re-integrate himself into the theatre as he resumed the daily running of the company.

Indeed throughout all this, Alan Ayckbourn remained largely silent as he began looking to the future of the Scarborough company and the theatre prepared to celebrate his 60th birthday in 1989.

60 Years At The SJT: 1985 - 1987

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1985 - 1987
The period of 1985 to 1987 is an unusual one for Alan Ayckbourn and the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round in Scarborough.
For it was dominated by another theatre completely, namely the National Theatre and Alan's decision to take a two year sabbatical to the NT between 1986 and 1988.

 In 1984, following on from the success of Alan's production of A Chorus Of Disapproval at the NT, its Artistic Director Peter Hall asked Alan if he would consider taking a position as a company director at the NT for two years.
By this point Alan had been associated with Scarborough since 1957 and had been Artistic Director since 1972. It was, Alan later admitted, the only offer he would have ever even remotely considered to take a break from Scarborough.
On 3 June 1985, the Scarborough Evening News broke the news that Alan Ayckbourn was to take a sabbatical from his adopted Scarborough home, but there was no mention of where he was going other than he frequently received offers to work with other theatres; it does appear though that despite the NT not being named, it was a badly kept secret and common knowledge that was his destination.
So associated with Scarborough had the playwright become, there was a huge amount of media interest in the news alongside questions of why Alan was leaving and whether he would be returning.
Considering all that was to follow, the answer was given at the very start by his partner and personal assistant heather Stoney, who noted: "Alan is looking for a break because he is very tired, but does not want to lose touch with Scarborough in the meantime. He will still be writing plays for the Scarborough theatre."

Implict in the initial announcement was Alan was leaving for a pre-determined period and would be returning to Scarborough. The theatre's manager, Ken Boden, admitted the theatre had known about the move for some time and had been 'taken aback' but the theatre felt it was a great honour that there was so much interest in Alan.
Plans were meanwhile put in place for his sabbatical with Alan's frequent collaborator Robin Herford being named Artistic Director of the venue alongside Alan Ayckbourn; Alan would not step down from the role, but would delegate the day-to-day running of the theatre to Robin.
It was confirmed at the end of the year that not only would the NT indeed by Alan's home for the next two years but the theatre's long-standing general manager, Ken Boden, would be standing down. Ken had been involved in the running of the theatre since Stephen Joseph founded the company in Scarborough in 1955.

Aside from feeling a need to take a rest from Scarborough, Alan announced that the offer by the NT was too good to refuse and offered a huge challenge to him which he hoped would re-invigorate him for Scarborough. The contract included working with his own company with three productions in each of the National Theatre's auditoria including the world premiere of a new work in the Olivier. It would give Alan an exposure and challenge he had never had before.
"A myth has grown up, quite without foundation, that the Theatre In The Round's success depends on me. This myth is particularly prevalent in London where some people think that every play produced at Scarborough is written by me," said the playwright at the time.
Although he did not write a new play for Scarborough for 1986 before he left - his final premiere before the sabbatical was Woman In Mind in 1985 - he did write a new adaptation of the Aldwych farce Tons Of Money, which he would also stage at the NT, and revived his classic Time & Time Again. He did confirm there would be new plays for both 1987 (Henceforward...) and 1988 (Man Of The Moment).
Alan left Scarborough in February to begin his work at the NT and, almost immediately, the gossip began that he was not to return, despite the fact it had been plainly stated from the start that he would not stay in London.
The prime instigator behind this appears to be the then Financial Times critic Michael Coveney who wrote an article implying that the playwright was leaving the seaside resort for good.
"There have been differences of opinion with Alan Ayckbourn's home town of Scarborough and he is sinking anchor at the National Theatre and running his own company."

The Scarborough theatre was quick to deny any such suggestion and rubbished claims that Alan had a rocky relationship with the town council; in fact, it had been a turbulent year for both Alan and the theatre, but no more turbulent than numerous other years between 1972 and 1986 including ones where he had publicly threatened to quit the town.
This unfounded report though did sting Alan and he quickly responded shooting down the allegation whilst also shedding a new light on his relationship with the Scarborough theatre, particularly another vicious rumour that he was personally profiting from the theatre.
For the first time it was revealed that he had never drawn a salary as Artistic Director of the theatre, had put in more than £70,000 of his own money to finance productions and that 1% of his gross box office receipts from productions of his work elsewhere went to the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round. He also confirmed he would be returning in May to Scarborough to direct the world premiere of Henceforward... before retrying to the NT.

Alan was then - as now - completely committed to the theatre which had made such a big impact on his life having been encouraged and inspired to write and direct by the company's founder Stephen Joseph.
To a small extent the rumours continued for several months, but it was tacitly acknowledged there was no story and the Stephen  Joseph Theatre In The Round was also thriving even without Alan running it.
Late in 1986, the playwright confirmed he would be back in six months once he had directed two final shows at the NT; his remit having been extended from three to four productions.
In 1988, Alan returned to the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, reinvigorated and re-enthused. His first production was the incredibly ambitious and classic Man Of The Moment and within two years he would be making his most ambitious plans for the theatre yet with plans to finally move the company to a permanent home.
His time in London had been a huge success, he had been lauded and won awards and his production of A View From The Bridge was acclaimed by Arthur Miller as the definitive production of his play.
He had proved a point. He had stretched his wings, met a new challenge and demonstrated to London his skills as not just playwright but also director, whilst also demonstrating the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round was not dependent on him alone and could run successfully without him.
Point proved, his began to eye his next challenge. One firmly set in Scarborough and the theatre he loved.

60 Years At The SJT: 1984

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1984
1984 saw the premiere of a play that is now considered an classic of the Ayckbourn canon, yet it had the potential to be very different.
We have already seen in 1982 how Alan Ayckbourn nearly wrote a thriller, Sight Unseen, but then changed his mind, salvaging only the characters and location to write Season's Greetings.
Two years later, he had another idea and although the basic concept always remained the same - a play set around a newcomer joining an amateur operatic society - the actual form it could have taken was wildly different from what was originally written.

The roots for A Chorus Of Disapproval go back to January 1984 when Alan received an enquiry from Peter Hall, Artistic Director of the National Theatre, whether he had any ideas for a new play for The Olivier at the venue.
This was the largest space at the NT and Alan took the opportunity to conceive an idea which would fill the stage with an amateur dramatic company and its production of Rudolf Friml's The Vagabond King....
I know what you're thinking, A Chorus Of Disapproval is centred around John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.
But not originally.
Alan had read The Vagabond King and admits it 'amused me no end' - and not in a particularly good way.

"It's one of the funniest Samuel French scripts in existance, because the songs have all got very, very painstakingly detailed stage directions on choreography: 'Man 2 and Man 13 run five paces down to L. and kneel, while Woman 15 dashes across to Man 4 and grasps him by the hand.' I had this image of this director, trying to direct the thing from a French's edition. As with all amateur societies, five of them hadn't turned up, two of them are standing in for others - you know, the comic results could be enormous!"

The ludicrous stage-directions would have obviously have had comic potential, but Alan had even grander ideas for the play - the first of his plays to include unexpected interaction from the audience.

"There would have been a large amateur choir, who would be scattered through the auditorium, reducing the audience capacity from its usual 303 to about 215 seats. There'd be about 85 singers, completely incognito, sitting in scattered seats, and at various points starting to sing from their seats - thus causing the person next to them to look absolutely alarmed."

It should be noted that in Paul Allen's biography of Alan Ayckbourn, he notes it would have been 20 people in the audience, but 85 or 20, it's still a fairly ludicrous amount of audience plants within a play.
To make this work for the original production in Scarborough, Alan needed more actors than he could possibly have afforded to pay, so he decided to turn to Scarborough's amateur community itself; creating a play about the amateur community populated by members of the amateur community - no possible chance of conflict there....
To this end, the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round placed an advert in the Scarborough Evening News, looking for budding amateur operatic members to appear in Alan's new play with the advert reading:

"He [Alan] is anxious to meet AMATEUR SINGERS who would be interested in taking part in this venture. Some Soloing experience is required at least sufficient to cope with the demands of the average Light Opera Society Repertoire."

Auditions actually took place with Alan Ayckbourn and leading members of the amateur community helping. Or rather not. At one point, Alan was shocked to see an auditionee begin singing before being abruptly told to leave. When Alan thought this had been done too harshly, he was told it was best not encourage them!
It was at this point that the whole project began too unravel and, perhaps, this was a blessing for the playwright who was uncertain about the direction the play was taking.

"Several things conspired to thwart the original idea. The Rudolph Friml Estate, fearing for their play, refused to release the rights. For which I didn't blame them one bit. Simultaneously, those members of the local Scarborough Operatic Society whom I had approached seemed reluctant to accept anything but leading roles, for which I didn't blame them either; and finally Equity, the Professional Actors' Trade Union, declared the whole idea of including amateurs in this way unacceptable. Which forced me into swift solutions, all of them, it transpired, blessings in disguise."

Alan returned to the script and abandoned The Vagabond King, which he later admitted was 'a load of garbage' and found instead a piece which he genuinely loved and was inspired by, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.

"I greatly admired and had always wanted to produce, Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Which in turn provided the missing piece to the whole venture. Gay's play had a plot which echoed almost perfectly the one I intended to write and provided the perfect mirror image on which to build my own dramatic structure. Moral: always work with something you admire and not with something which you only set out to make fun of. That way you might even manage to raise your game rather than lower it."

With Equity having forcibly refused Alan's desire to have 85 amateurs in the company - presumably misguidedly believing Alan was about to employ 85 extra professionals - he jettisoned the grand scale for a small professional company and the play as we know it today began to take shape.
It was not all a wasted experience though as although Alan has frequently emphasised no-one in A Chorus Of Disapproval is based on a real person, his experiences with the amateur community did provide plenty of inspiration particularly for Pendoan Amateur Light Operatic Society's Artistic Director, Guy ap Llewellyn.
Alan, meanwhile, had written to Peter Hall and informed him of the changes to the play he had initially proposed.

“Needless to say, the play is vastly different from the one I described to you on the phone a few weeks ago. No chorus of amateurs. Just a few good singers. (Equity intervened there). I had to go back to John Gay as his agent was the only one who didn’t raise an objection.”

On 2 May 1984, A Chorus Of Disapproval opened at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough, much altered from its original concept and none the worse for it. It would prove to be tremendously popular both in Scarborough and, the following year, at the National Theatre.
It would go on to become one of the most revived and popular plays in the Ayckbourn canon - and much beloved by amateur companies, which is not something the playwright would ever have predicted.

60 Years At The SJT: 1983

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1983
In 1983, Alan Ayckbourn made the headlines nationally as he was announced to be more popular than Shakespeare.

Since then, that fact has been regurgitated endlessly in the media despite patently being untrue - it wasn't even substantively accurate in 1983!
In a culture today where 'fake news' is seemingly on every one's lips, Alan Ayckbourn has been the subject of it for more than three decades. For if you've ever read any article which proclaims that Alan Ayckbourn is the most performed playwright in the UK or the second most performed after Shakespeare, it has no basis in fact and is actually completely unprovable.
And, more importantly, doesn't reflect the original facts from which these statements were originally drawn.
All that can be said with absolute confidence is that Alan Ayckbourn in 1983 - within a very specific and narrow context - was demonstrably proved to have been produced more than Shakespeare.
On 2 November 1983, the Arts Council issued a press release leading with 'Ayckbourn more popular than Shakespeare.' The rest, over time, has largely been forgotten.

 The report was drawn up to highlight attendance at the UK's regional, subsidised theatres at the time and covered just 36 theatres. Within this most narrow of contexts, audiences to see plays by Alan Ayckbourn were higher than those to Shakespeare's with Willy Russell in third place between 1981 and 1983.
During those two years, 327,000 people went to see an Ayckbourn  play as opposed to 318,000 to a Shakespeare play - however the Bard nudged Ayckbourn on performances with 1,060 compared to 1,034.
It was notable at the time and subsequent reports over the next few years had Alan swapping between first and second places fairly regularly. Again, always within a very specific, defined context of regional subsidise theatre.
The reports which are no longer produced offer an interesting insight into regional theatre at the time and do prove that Alan Ayckbourn was very popular in the regions, but little more.

The reports did not include the West End (although he was exceptionally popular throughout the '80s in the West End) nor commercial theatres nor amateur theatres. Now had all these been included it's highly likely Alan would still have been in a similar position, but there are - nor have there ever been - statistics which include all theatrical venues / productions in the UK.

But that did not stop, over the years, the story transmuting until it became regular practise - still to this day - to name Alan as the second most performed playwright in the UK after Shakespeare.
With no evidence. No facts. No references.

Now he may well be the second or third most performed playwright after Shakespeare, but there are no statistics available to back this up. All we know is he is very popular and consistently performed by professionals and amateurs throughout the UK.
When in 1990, Alan was named the second most performed playwright after Shakespeare in the same Arts Council survey, this was also widely reported and seems to have become the source of so many 'facts' reported in Ayckbourn stories ever since.
So if anyone ever says to you, Alan Ayckbourn is more popular than Shaksepeare, you can reply: "Yes. Yes, he was. Over a specific period of two years in 36 regional, subsidised theatres in England, he was more popular than Shakespeare. But in 2017, all we can say is he's very popular and been very successful."
And being popular and produced is more than enough to satisfy the playwright, be it in 1983 or 2017.

60 Years At The SJT: 1982

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1982
1982 for Alan Ayckbourn and the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough, is dominated by a single play.
Albeit a single play of epic proportions.
It opened on 3 June 1982 and would run in repertory until 1 October 1983 - although it would not be finished until 1 February 1983 nor seen in its entirety until nine months after it had first opened.
The play is Intimate Exchanges and it challenged the playwright, his actors and the his home theatre as no other play before.
The roots of Intimate Exchanges actually lay in the previous year's equally challenging - if in a completely different way - Way Upstream; this being a play which required a cabin cruiser moving through a flooded stage with rainfall. Technically as complicated as the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round was ever likely to get.
Astonishingly, the company toured Way Upstream to the Alley Theatre, Houston, during early 1983 during which, Alan Ayckbourn discovered he was to lose most of his repertory company and his initial plans for the 1983 summer season were spoilt. For various reasons, most of the company were either departing or taking a break and Alan was left with just two actors; but two very respected actors.
Whilst the playwright has subsequently noted he could have just recast or brought a new company in, he found himself left with two of the most experienced actors in the company.
He'd had an idea for a play for two people for some time utilising a concept he had begun exploring in 1980 with Sisterly Feelings. It would be a radical combination.

This seemed the perfect time to pursue an idea that had been haunting me ever since Sisterly Feelings, namely to write a large scale multi-ended opus in which choices genuinely lead to other choices in an increasing proliferation - one, two, four, eight, sixteen and so on. It was intended not merely as a vast gimmick, but to pursue a theory that I had long held that the tiny, often careless choices we make in our lives can lead to vast consequences. In Intimate Exchanges, during the overall canon, depending on whether or not Celia Teasdale decides to have a cigarette in the first five seconds, several people are divorced, start affairs, have children together, die, and even, very occasionally, live happily ever after.

In Sisterly Feelings, Alan had written a play which had randomly determined alternate scenes for the two middle scenes of the play, so the play had four potential variations. But this was a scaled down version of his original idea for the play, which would have been a branching play starting with a common first scene which branched at the end of each scene, leading to a total of eight possible permutations.
Alan decided to simplify this structure, but like so many of his ideas, it stayed in his mind waiting for the right moment to be developed. He now had that opportunity but on an even larger scale. A play that would ultimately have 16 different permutations.

First and foremost though, he needed the co-operation of his two actors. Without them - without actors he trusted and knew were capable of meeting the challenge - the project would be a non-starter. Over two dinners in Houston, he proposed the idea separately to Robin Herford and Lavinia Bertram. Added to the complex structure was also the final piece of this jigsaw. Each actor would play at least four different roles. The request was obviously flattering to each actor and both tentatively agreed to the idea, although Robin - recently a father - was not at all confident about what he had committed himself to. It was not long before the sheer scale of the play revealed itself.

"Here were two actors I'd worked with for years and years, two people who would actually trust me, and I could trust them, to do a play of an enormous nature."

Alan began with the structure, setting out the general course of each of the plays. The initial plan was to actually write the complete play in one go and introduce it entirely over the course of the 1982 summer season at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round.
This proved impractical and was altered to Alan writing four of the eight major variations for the summer season before writing and introducing the rest of the variations over the course of the following year. The plays would begin in June, run through the summer, come back into repertory for the autumn before taking over the theatre again from January to mid April coming back in the summer the following year.
Not only was it an ambitious idea, but potentially a very risky one. Eric Thompson, the director of the London production of The Norman Conquests, had once remarked of the trilogy that if audiences didn't like the first one, they weren't going to come and see the other two and they'd have not one but three flops on their hands. Here, the stakes were even higher. It was one play, but it was essentially a year's worth of programming for the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough.
If audiences did not like the idea or support the notion of visiting multiple times, it could be a very expensive risk for the venue.
The scale of the piece - and perhaps even the lunacy of the idea - had begun to become clear when rehearsals started in May 1982. Alan had completed three of the variants with one other largely completed. The summer season opened on 3 June with A Cricket Match, which went into repertoire with the other two completed variants. The rest were introduced over the course of the year ending with A Pageant premiering in February 1982. By this point Alan had written 31 scenes which incorporated approximately 16 hours of dialogue, ten characters, 12 major set changes and dozens of quick changes.
At the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, a huge diagram of the structure was hung in the foyer with lights to indicate the choices of that evening's performance (unlike Sisterly Feelings, the scale of Intimate Exchanges precludes an in-performance random element) and it was emphasised not only could the plays be seen in any order but that it was not necessary to see all the plays - or any more than one - but the more you saw, the richer the play and the characters would become.

"Intimate Exchanges is, hopefully, a project that grows on you. And grows. And grows…. You will appreciate that working on a canvas this size - with nearly 30 hours of drama - it was my intention that the characters should continually unfurl and spring, just occasionally, the odd surprise. I hope they'll always remain the same, in that they're true to themselves always, but will nonetheless develop as new pressures or situations present themselves."

The audience reaction was key to the success of Intimate Exchanges, more so than the critical reaction. After all, positive word of mouth would keep people coming and talking about the play over the course of a year. A good review might bring people in initially, but it would not be read or relevant a week later - never mind fifty weeks later (particularly in a pre-internet era when it was not so simple to track down old reviews).
Fortunately, the audience response was overwhelmingly positive with people keen to return and see how the lives of the characters altered with the choices made. It validated Alan's decision to dedicate so much of a year's programming to the play and was, no doubt, gratifying to the actors who were having to learn so much dialogue.
The play's run ended on 1 October 1983, preceded in April by the Intimate Exchanges Grand Marathon, a much publicised sell-out event in which every possible permutation of the play was offered in 16 performances over 12 days.

The size of the piece has meant that it has only ever been revived in its entirety one other time - although the various parts of the play have been performed individually, as pairs or with four combinations over the years.
The revival was, naturally, at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, in 2006 when Bill Champion and Claudia Elmhirst undertook the ambitious challenge. But that production had its own issues when Alan Ayckbourn had a stroke two weeks before rehearsals began - and the story of that will be told in approximately 20 weeks as part of this 60 year celebration!
Back in the 1980s and Intimate Exchanges would go on to transfer to the Greenwich Theatre before moving to the Ambassador's Theatre in the West End, still starring Robin Herford and Lavinia Bertram. Essentially their lives would be dominated by Intimate Exchanges from May 1982 to February 1985. Afterwards, Robin would retire from acting to concentrate on directing!
Intimate Exchanges remains to this day one of Alan Ayckbourn's most ambitious works and like Way Upstream the year before, clearly demonstrated that the playwright and his home theatre were committed to exciting and extraordinary theatre - for which the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round become well known for throughout this decade.

"It was a fascinating and very rewarding experience which I don’t think any of us will ever forget. Between Robin and Lavinia, they memorised thirty scenes, eleven different characters and sixteen or so hours of dialogue. I described it rather pompously as a Festival of the Art of Acting. Lavinia described it as an orgy."

Author's note: We'll be taking a short break from the 60 Years features and they'll return in two weeks on Friday 2 June.

60 Years At The SJT: 1981

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1981
When it comes to 1981 and Alan Ayckbourn's time at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, there is really only one thing to discuss.
But then, when you announce a play that will essentially turn a small regional theatre into a canal, it's quite hard for anything else to compete!
Welcome toAlan Ayckbourn's play Way Upstream.
Alan has become well known over the decades for his fondness for what he terms 'event theatre'; productions which celebrate theatre, particularly its liveness and offer an experience that can only be truly appreciated in the theatre.
His first of these was arguably The Norman Conquests trilogy at the Library Theatre in 1973. Way Upstream marked his first major theatrical event at the company's second home, the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, and it pretty much went for broke.
The inspiration for the play is surprisingly prosaic and didn't - initially - necessarily involve the idea of the most challenging setting to have yet appeared in an Ayckbourn play.

"I wanted to write a play about the nature of leadership, and why some members consider themselves to be leaders and others don't, and the ones who do consider themselves to be leaders are obviously the ones who shouldn't be anyway, and the ones who don't consider themselves to be leaders would probably make very good ones if they put themselves forward. It's an ironic twist. Just to write a play with five or six people sitting in a living room discussing it would probably be very boring, but I got the idea of setting it in a cabin cruiser on the River Thames, because that is where the nature of leadership always comes out. You see these red-faced men in yachting caps shouting at their reluctant families 'Come along darling, tie up, tie up, come on!' That was three or four ideas in one play."

Of course, it wasn't such a simple step as just deciding to write a play and fill your stage with water, you need to be sure it's practically possible and here Alan had the good fortune of discovering the theatre - based on the ground floor level of a former school - was blessed with concrete floors. Previously, Alan's original production of Time And Time Again had seen the pond develop a leak into the reading room below the Library Theatre on the first floor of Scarborough's public library.
Here, if water spilt or leaked, it was only going to flood the theatre rather than the metal-working classes held in the floor below by a local college!
Way Upstream was scheduled to open on 2 October 1981 and Alan began writing it on the 11 August As was common at the time, it meant that when the play was being publicised, Alan had not written a single word of the script and there was a suitably nebulous description in the summer brochure.

"At the time of going to press all we have is the title and a brief description that the play is a tale of mutiny and piracy set aboard a cabin cruiser on a sleepy English river, but rest assured that the script will arrive in time for rehearsals, so don’t miss the opportunity of being among the first audience ever to see this new play from Alan Ayckbourn."

In an interview from the time, Alan himself was equally coy about what he was creating, except to say that it was going to be quite different to anything he had written before.

"It is for me quite a departure. Whatever else I'm being accused of, I don't think I'm trotting out the same old play again."

Of course, one would imagine that when contemplating the most adventurous and challenging production to have yet be staged by the company, preparation and planning would begun some months in advance.
Or not.
Alan finished writing the play in early September and - approximately four weeks - before the play was due to open, spoke to his designer - Edward Lipscomb - about the precise needs of the play.
This essentially boiled down to building a tank to enable the flooding the auditorium, creating a watertight and movable boat and having a localised downpour. Just another day in the life of a designer and theatre production team!

Edward's first step was to contact a water effects specialist. Byll Elliot, who was responsible for the water effects at the Paris Lido. The job of his company -  Watersculptures of Lancaster - was to create a rainstorm as well as creating realistic waves spray out from the bow of the boat and a wake from the boat's stern.
The depth of the water, concealed by a specially formulated powered to make the water murky, was just nine-and-half inches, which had to cover anything required to move the boat as well as hiding the platform the boat would be built upon.
For this, Edward turned to the local firm Archer Industrial Systems, who built a revolving plate which was placed on a trolley which moved along rails installed within the tank - all of which had to be built without knowing the precise dimensions and weight of the finished boat; they had just three weeks to achieve this!
The boat itself came from a local boat builder, Colin Wigglesworth, based at Riggs Head near Scarborough. Edward explained they needed a boat without a bottom and could they help?
Fortunately, the firm had old moulds for cabin cruisers - no longer in  demand and last used in 1965 - and from there were able to construct a boat in three sections  measuring 19ft in length; each section had to fit through a four ft, nine inches door to get into the auditorium.
Back in the theatre, thick - but flexible - plastic sheeting was laid creating a watertight pool around the auditorium which had removed the first row of seats to build up to the necessary depth. Onto the plastic heating went the rails constructed by Archers. Electrics were then installed, which obviously involved a great deal of isolation given the proximity to a body of water!
Watersculptures had meanwhile installed a simple pump with a pipe running up to and across the ceiling ending in a shower which could create the rain effect.
The boat was brought into the theatre on Sunday 28 September and assembled onto the plate which was now on the rails. A motor to move the boat / plate was installed which proved to be too small and blew up. A new larger motor was order from Leeds, which arrived the day before the show was due to open, but when installation was completed at 4am, it also did not work; the problem fortunately discovered to have been a short in the terminal box.
On the Tuesday, the Yorkshire Water Authority arrived to fill the tank using two high powered fire hoses to fill the entire tank. All the while, carpenters and the production team were working on the boat to finish it.

The boat was finally ready by the Friday when it was decided to test out the water effects for the first time; the water was turned on and a monsoon appeared which was so heavy that the water bounced off the boat into the auditorium seats. It was decided not use the rain during the first performance as adjustments were made for more of a drizzle than a storm!
Despite the water technicians creating a rainstorm, it was realised too late they had not accounted for one thing which broke the illusion of the play. A dripping shower head. After the storm, the water did not completely shut off and dripped onto the boat.
This was solved by the theatre's master carpenter Frank Matthews, who simply rigged a string operated cup by the shower head that could be released to cover the head once the rain had stopped, catching any drips.
The issue with the motor meant a dress rehearsal was lost and the technical rehearsal did not take place until the actual opening day, finishing just 25 minutes before the show had its opening! Despite all this, as Alan testifies, it was all very much worth the stress and pressure experienced by everyone involved in bringing it to the stage in time.,

"It was exciting with the Way Upstream experience when various elements pulled together. We asked a local boatyard to provide a 'sawn off' boat, for instance, and local interest certainly caught fire with this show. It was not an easy project, and it was trial and error. It was a new technology to move bottomless boats with motors through water - albeit only ten inches of it. With a varying number of people on board it required a great deal of work with gears and motors. If the motor was too strong the boat shot water everywhere, and if it was too feeble it started to catch fire. Our poor engineer was rushing backwards and forwards trying different strengths of motor and various gearing When it worked, which thank heavens it did on the first night, there was a sort of sigh of relief from the entire audience followed by a huge round of applause. A sort of 'thank you, God' followed by applause."

With the exception of the cancellation of the first preview to accommodate the technical rehearsal, it is remarkable to think no performance was cancelled during the play's original run at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round and that it was a technical triumph achieved on a shoestring budget.
The play was a resounding hit with Scarborough and apparently the sight of the 'lake-in-the-round' when audiences first entered the auditorium was hugely exciting.
The play enjoyed a sell-out run at the theatre and the first night audience - full of Scarborough people who had worked on everything from building the cruiser to designing the winch system for movement - apparently cheered as the boat moved away from its moorings for the first time.
Way Upstream is notably the first of Alan Ayckbourn's play to leave the suburban household and marked a new phase of his writing. It was hardly a tentative step into the world at large!
Of course, the question is, how do you follow something of this scale?

Well, initially, Alan decided to tour the production. To Houston. Way Upstream transferred with the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round company across the Atlantic in February 1982 for a month long residency. Way Upstream was staged at the Alley Theatre in a water-filled stage complete with moving boat and rainstorm and went incredibly smoothly on a limited budget.

Somewhat ironic given that the National Theatre with a huge budget and all its technical resources was not initially able to achieve this the following year with its infamous staging issues.

And after touring Way Upstream? What could Alan possibly follow this up with at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round?

Only a two-hander play.

Albeit a two-hander which happened to have sixteen different endings, more than 30 hours of dialogue, 10 characters and took more than a year to unveil in all its glory....

60 Years At The SJT: 1980

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1980
1980 saw Alan Ayckbourn write what is arguably one of his most famous plays and which has proved to be perennially popular with Season's Greetings.
Yet it is a play that shouldn't exist. It was neither planned nor intended. Most of the characters and the location came from another play entirely. It was only a rarity in Alan's writing career which led to him creating what is now seen as a quintessential Ayckbourn play.
His original plan for the autumn of 1980 was to write a thriller called Sight Unseen. The playwright had never written a thriller before and admitted he was nervous about it in a letter to the director Christopher Morahan in August 1980.

“I’m about to write play 25 and am pacing nervously. It’s called, somewhat fittingly, Sight Unseen. Assuming I finish that, I shall have it rehearsed and into repertoire by the end of September.”

The concept was the play would be set in a  suburban English home, where there would be a murderer - the identity of whom would be randomly chosen each night during the performance.
Despite the fact Alan had not written a single word of the play, it was announced the public on 23 August 1980 when the Yorkshire Post published that the new play, Sight Unseen, would premiere on 24 September at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough.
As for what it was about, no-one was any the wiser, as the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round press officer noted: "All we have at the moment is a working title for the play. No one has a clue what the play is about and we shall not know until Alan gives us the script."
The script was never to arrive....
Alan set to writing the play - as usual very close to the deadline of the start of rehearsals - but there was quickly a problem.

“It's wrong to say I was actually into the dialogue stage. I was into the construction stage: I was putting up the fences. I then did a volte face and left myself with just two things from the thriller. One was that I set it in a hallway which I quite liked.”

The few remaining notes which survive of this idea are held in the Ayckbourn Archive at the University Of York and they give a clear indication about who the victim was and the potential reasons for his murder....

> Belinda kills Nev to free her
> Derek kills Nev to free her
> Bernard kills Nev to avoid family break-up
> Veronica kills Nev to avoid family break-up

With rehearsals looming and no play, Alan was faced with a problem. He needed a play and he needed a play which had the same casting requirements as Sight Unseen, given the piece had already been cast!
What he did have, as the notes above show, was utilise the names for the characters and the setting. From there, he very quickly began to construct an entirely new play based around Christmas at the Bunker household, home to husband and wife Belinda and Neville; previous potential murderer and victim from Sight Unseen!

Despite the rush to write Season's Greetings, it was finished just a day later than planned and on 5 September, his new play had its first read-through. The slight delay led to the play opening a day later than expected.
As to why writing Sight Unseen had suddenly thrown up an unexpected obstacle, Alan would later talk about the pitfalls of writing thrillers for the stage and, particularly, of one where the murderer could be anyone..

"If you're going to write a good whodunnit, everyone's got to have done it, you see; and you then pull away about six motives and leave one there. And then you say: 'Ah yes, he's the one who did it, because he was the only one who had the front door key.' But the point is that I first of all had to write a cast of homicidal maniacs, because they all had to have killed Mr. X. And that was extremely boring. When you've got a couple of homicidal maniacs it's quite fun, but here they were all saying: 'I really hated him, I'd have killed him if I'd had the chance.' And I felt there were awful limits in having to prescribe your characters' behaviours. I'm very used to letting my characters roam around much more freely than that. To have to saddle them with a load of hatred and malice, or even sheer clumsiness, was very hard. And I didn't want to write a straight whodunnit where we just eliminated it down to one: I wanted to write a whodunnit where any one of them could have done it - to keep it absolutely open. And I came to the conclusion it was rather a boring thing to write."

So a play was announced and then withdrawn before being replaced by a quickly devised play which turned out to be a classic. But there's another little known side to the story, which might have seen Alan premiering a very unexpected piece at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round.

Just as Season's Greetings came to the end of its initial run in Scarborough, Alan's agent - Margaret Ramsay - was contacted by Lynda Obst - Vice President of Creative Affairs at the entertainment company Polygram.
Polygram Pictures and Universal Pictures were actively considering making a film based on the famed board game Cluedo (Clue in the USA). It was a very serious proposal which had already attracted Debra Hill as producer with Jon Peters and Peter Guber as Executive Producers; the latter would go on to become two of the most powerful producers in Hollywood during the 1980s.
As for why they contacted Peggy, they were looking for writers for the piece and Peggy knew who to suggest it to. Alan had long had a passion for board games (as fans of The Norman Conquests may well have surmised) and the suggestion he might write a script for Clue “greatly amused” him.
Perhaps surprisingly - given his lack of interest in writing screenplays - he told Peggy he was open to discussing the project, but there was a caveat. It would be first written as a play and then adapted into a film.
This idea appealed to Alan as potentially it would involve Universal putting money into the theatre, specifically the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round as that is where the play would have presumably premiered.
The concept of turning a board-game where anyone could be the killer might have had limited appeal to many writers, but - of course - Alan had been thinking of writing the same idea with Sight Unseen. However, he soon realised this might be equally problematic to write.

“I dug out my old Cluedo board which was interesting. What of course the Cluedo inventor has done is what the inventors of all the classic games have done. He's taken every cliché from the genre and boiled them all down into a board game. It's even subtitled in the rules Murder at Tudor Close, and the whole thing is a mixture of every Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Allingham murder mystery you've ever read…. Nothing wrong with that I suppose, providing they want another in the endless series of nostalgia movies. Do they really want another Murder on the Nile / Orient Express, particularly when there’s about two hundred of that good lady's books still left to adapt. Not to mention Dorothy L. Sayers.
“No, as I see it we must somehow concentrate on the project's most original theme, which is perhaps somewhat oddly the fact that it is a board game. I am not suggesting that the characters all be dressed as wooden counters whilst the audience are expected to throw a dice - though I wouldn't rule that out - but unless it’s set somehow within the framework of a game then the Cluedo part of it will essentially be lost and all we’ll have is a run of the mill thriller.”

By this stage, the news had leaked out and the New Standard newspaper reported on 11 February 1981 that Alan was involved in a movie adaptation of the famous board-game.

However, the idea of such an usual piece appearing in Scarborough were rapidly vanishing. Although the studio agreed in essence to this proposal, an initial screenplay was requested. This seemed pointless to Alan as if the screenplay existed, there would be no need to write a play and the producers would no doubt lose interest in it as a play.
Shortly afterwards, with Peggy unconvinced d a deal could be struck, Alan withdrew from the project perhaps knowing that his radical approach to the script would not be deemed palatable to Polygram; this supported by the fact that when Clue was eventually made into a movie in 1984, it was a very conventional and run-of-the-mill comedy-thriller which had little to do with the game except a gimmick of random final reels with different killers; none of which made much sense and were irrelevant as most cinemas only received a complete movie with no alternative reels anyway.
So ended a most unusual chapter with Alan and the Stephen Joseph Theatre; although there is an epilogue.
After being unable to write Sight Unseen and turning down Clue, Alan would go on to write his first thriller in 1983 with It Could Be Any One Of Us. It's notable feature? A random murderer every night.
Just like Sight Unseen.

60 Years At The SJT: 1979

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1979
If there is a single 'fact' that has been perpetually mis-reported during most of Alan Ayckbourn's long career as a playwright, it would be he is a farceur.
He isn't. Never has been. Never will be.
True, he has written plays with elements of farce within them but works frequently cited - such as The Norman Conquests, Absurd Person Singular, Relatively Speaking and - yes - Bedroom Farce - are assuredly not true farces.
They're comedies - mainly tragicomedies, occasionally high comedies - or, as the playwright like to note, just plays. Generally, Alan Ayckbourn likes to make you feel more than one emotion during the course of an evening.
However, there is an exception to this rule. For out of the 81 full-length plays he has written, one is indisputably a true, no doubts about, farce. Just one though.

Taking Steps, which Alan himself dedicated to the master farceur Ben Travers when it premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough, in 1979.
Twenty years after he began writing - with the now withdrawn first play The Square Cat being as close to farce as Alan ever came between 1959 and 1979 - Alan decided to set himself the challenge of writing a farce, which fully met the conventions of the genre.
Why a challenge? Because as the playwright notes, he considers farce one of the hardest genres to write in, which explains the lack of them during his career,
“They [farces] are the most difficult plays to write because you are asking for a seemingly logical string of circumstances to lead to something totally illogical and unlikely without the audience for a moment looking back, and saying, “Oh no, wait a minute, this couldn’t happen.”…. The more wild the journey the more crafty and crafted the play has to be. I mean, this is no mistake, that most farce-writers are quite old dramatists, if not in years at least in experience.”
At the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, the summer of 1979 had been dominated by Alan's random choice play Sisterly Feelings, which could be produced any one of four ways depending on the flip of a coin and the whim of an actor. It was a huge and ambitious production for the Scarborough theatre.
But arguably, it wasn't the defining production of that year. That came at the end of the summer season with a play that was neither scheduled nor advertised in the main brochure. At the end of August, a promotional flyer was printed advertising a new Ayckbourn.
“A little earlier than usual comes Alan Ayckbourn’s 'annual' play. This, his 23rd [actually 24th], opens on Friday 28 September and plays for only four performances during this run before the professional company takes a month’s break. At the moment all we have is the title, but rest assured the script will arrive in time for rehearsals, so don’t miss this opportunity to be the first audience ever to see the new offering of this phenomenally popular and entertaining writer.”
Whilst this may seem a strange way to promote a play at a month's notice, it was actually all too common at the Scarborough venue given Alan's predilection for writing his plays to the latest possible deadline; generally a day before rehearsals began.

So it was not unusual for the theatre to not know what the play was either about or like until rehearsals began. In this case, early September by which point the four performances had sold out.
Except, even as rehearsals started, no-one truly knew what this play was like because he hadn't finished writing it. Describing it as "a pig to finish" Alan couldn't find a satisfactory climax before rehearsals were due to begin!
"The only time I fell down on the job was over Taking Steps. Farce is the most difficult thing of all to write because it has to be a riot from beginning to end. I was a couple of days late with it this year and strayed into my rehearsal period."
Having missed most of the first week of rehearsal - with inspiration only coming after he apparently slept on the problem - was Alan's play ready for its first read-through.
Which did not go quite as planned.
For while the actor Robin Herford recalls that most of the company “wept our way” through the reading, one actor was less than impressed and declared themselves not happy with their role. Quite possibly unique in the history of Alan's plays, this led to a confrontation between playwright and actor, which saw the actor leave the rehearsal room and the company, never to return.
Fortunately, a replacement was quickly found and rehearsals from that point proceeded smoothly and Alan began to reveal details of the play to the public.

“[This is] me in cheerful vein. I wrote it as a humble tribute to Ben Travers. I’m rather superstitious and produce my plays only in winter and spring. This time I decided to try a jolly autumn one for a change.”
Not only was Alan making a rare excursion into farce, but also writing a play specifically for the round; it is often forgotten that Alan has written the vast majority of his plays for theatre-in-the-round, although only Taking Steps (and, to an extent, How The Other Half Loves) are designed to specifically work only in the round.
“It [Taking Steps] is perhaps one of the archetypal ‘in the round’ plays because the floor is vitally important, and the floor, of course, in the round is like the backcloth is in the proscenium, everyone sees the floor and the joke is based around the floor.”

Taking Steps opened on 28 September 1979 and despite the fact its success was almost guaranteed, there was still an anxious wait to see how a play so different to Alan’s most recent creations would be received. The response was unexpected for both Alan and the acting company.
"I find the cast sitting in the tiny green room in stunned silence. The applause is still rattling through the tannoy speaker on the wall. Finally it dies out. There is a pause. Then one of them says, 'It’s a bit frightening this really, isn’t it?'"
Apparently the first night ran 17 minutes longer than it had in dress rehearsals due to the sheer volume of laughter. Alan’s first true farce was a hit. Following its short run, it returned in repertory from 30 October to 12 January becoming one of the Scarborough theatre’s biggest hits since it opened in 1955.
Alan would also note to his agent, Margaret 'Peggy' Ramsay that "It's just had three of the best receptions that I've ever had for any play of mine in Scarborough."
It also became the first play to run for more than 100 performances when it returned for the 1980 summer season; memorably the Scarborough Evening News reported “Taking Steps Clocks Up 1,000 Shows" - nearly there, just not quite.

Despite all its success in Scarborough, the West End production - which ran concurrently with the 1980 Scarborough production - was largely an unmitigated disaster in the playwright's eyes, as this memorable account from Paul Allen's biography of Alan Ayckbourn, Grinning At The Edge shows.
“On the London opening night of Taking Steps the Act 1 curtain arrived to almost complete silence, in contrast to the aching roar greeting it in Scarborough, and things were not much better at the end. Alan was aware of the sound of [his partner] Heather sobbing beside him. 'She was more upset than I was. I just went out into the night,' he says, but I suspect his upset was simply buried at once.”
The disappointment of the production marked the final time he would let anyone but himself direct a London premier of a new work. His only comfort was that his own production was running simultaneously in Scarborough with the polar opposite reaction.
“It’s very interesting: it’s the first time that a play of mine - Taking Steps - opened in London while it was still running in Scarborough. I’ve never done that before. It was like looking at two pictures. And you say: 'Well, I don’t care what they say down there and whether they think this or that. There’s a whole group of people in here who are having a marvellous time.' And in that sense one was perhaps able to survive the buffers of that experience better.”

Of the more than 600 productions staged by the Stephen Joseph company in its three homes since 1955, Taking Steps undoubtedly deserves a place as one of the most significant. And you don't have to take my word for it, for you can judge Alan's Ayckbourn's only farce this summer when it returns to Scarborough, directed by Alan Ayckbourn, at the SJT.

Taking Steps, directed by Alan Ayckbourn, can be seen at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, from 13 July to 5 October. Further details and bookings can be found at www.sjt.uk.com.

60 Years At The SJT: 1978

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1978
Two years after leaving its original home at the Library Theatre in Scarborough, it became obvious that the 'short-term' venue the company had moved to was to become more permanent than expected.
Acknowledging this on 1 April 1978, the Theatre In The Round At Westwood was renamed the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round to mark the company's 23 year affiliation with its late creator, Stephen Joseph.

The decision to sink roots at its new home - for what would turn out to be 20 years - led to a number of changes in both the venue and the company. One of the most significant being the appointment of the company's first Musical Director, Paul Todd.
Joining the company in early 1978, Paul would work extremely closely with Alan Ayckbourn over the next decade bringing more music into productions, forming the company's first house band and encouraging an increasingly ambitious and wide visiting music programme at the theatre.
He was also pivotal in allowing Alan to increasingly explore music within his plays and for him to return to the musical genre in which he had been badly stung by his experiences with the West End mega flop Jeeves in 1975 alongside Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Alan's first foray into lyric writing with Paul came with the late night revue, Men On Women On Men, in the recently opened Studio space at the theatre. The revue featured 14 songs including Copy Type; a song which has frequently been performed by award-winning actress Janie Dee in her own revues.
The success of the piece would lead to Paul and Alan working on a further nine lunchtime and late night revues together between 1978 and 1986; a couple of which would also be revived by the pair when Alan joined the National Theatre for a two-year sabbatical from 1986 to 1988.
Men On Women On Men would also mark the first time Alan would direct his own work for television as, in 1979, BBC North recorded the piece with much of the original company. Recorded in black and white, running to just half-an-hour and screened only once - and then confined purely to the BBC North area of broadcast - it is a largely unknown and unseen piece of Ayckbourn on television.

Even more obscure is the fact that in 1984, BBC North also recorded the Ayckbourn / Todd revue The 7 Deadly Virtues at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough. Reduced to half an hour and renamed Deadly Virtues - by virtue of not covering all seven pieces - there is no known surviving recording of this and shown just once at 10.15pm, it was seen by a very small audience.
It is in fact strange to note that Alan Ayckbourn - who has largely shunned television with just one original screenplay for the format - has directed for television three times, each time a music oriented piece with the last being a television adaptation of By Jeeves.
The success of Men On Women On Men quickly led Alan to work with Paul on his first full-length musical since Jeeves with Suburban Strains in 1980. Alan and Paul would also produce the musical Making Tracks in 1981; the use of music opening up another path for Alan's writing.

“The music actually helps me as a playwright; it's given me that necessary kick beyond naturalism. You have an equivalent of the soliloquy, no need for a boring old drunk scene to make characters say what they feel. If you suddenly bring in a shaft of music from somewhere, they can actually play the subtext. Generally the English prefer to hint round the truth, which is fun and leads to a lot of comedy, but for me it's been very interesting to find this other dimension.”
Paul and Alan worked together until 1987, after which the Musical Director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round became John Pattison. During this period, Alan's use of music within his plays - often cinematically with incidental themes became prominent - and he wrote Dreams From A Summer House together with John.
Alan would later go on to work extensively with the composer Denis King and, as of 2017, since his first revue with Paul Todd in 1978, Alan has written seven full-length musicals and eleven revues; it is now considered a major strand of his writing career and yet all began in the Studio at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round with the idea of a late night entertainment to keep audiences in the building.

60 Years At The SJT: 1977

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1977
By 1977, Alan Ayckbourn had been writing professionally for 18 years and written 20 plays.
Despite this, his 21st play would demonstrate that no matter how experienced he was, sometimes the process of writing a play is still not an easy one and can be beset by wrong turns and problems.
Ten Times Table was such a play.
The previous year had seen the opening of the Theatre In The Round At Westwood, a new home for the company of which Alan was now Artistic Director following 20 years at the Library Theatre. Alan had chosen to open the venue not with a new play, but a revival of one of the few plays which had not been previously produced in Scarborough, Mr Whatnot.
His first new play at the venue would come in 1977 and would reflect much of the frustration he experienced in moving the company to its new home; predominantly through the interminable amount of meetings he attended.
Ten Times Table was announced to the world on 6 November 1976 by the Yorkshire Post with other publications - such as the Daily Telegraph - also carrying the news that his '20th' play (actually his 21st) would open in January with the title Ten Times Table, but no other details existed as it had not been written yet.

At the time, Alan still wrote to the latest possible deadlines which was generally as close to rehearsals starting as possible.
His central idea for Ten Times Table essentially remained the same throughout the writing process centring on a committee of ten people preparing for a historical festival in his fictional town of Pendon.
Early notes show the plot was initially slightly more fixated on the relationships between the characters and that rather than based in the single location of the final play, it was multi-location with the action moving variously between the Swan Hotel and the homes of the various committee members, as this brief hand-written description notes.
"Follow Lawrence and Charlotte in [act] I through the eyes of the friends. We see Lawrence and Charlotte beginning the Friends Committee up to its break up. [Act] II Lawrence and Charlotte at home - guests etc. Their relationship under pressure. [Act] III The break up - the Festival in the tent?"

Admittedly, this doesn't really resemble the final play (other than the committee and the festival), but this is where the play originated and, from which point, Alan began writing on Tuesday 21 December.
In context, rehearsals were set for Wednesday 29 December with the play opening on 18 January.
At which point, it all went wrong.
"I broke down in the middle. I actually got to a point in the play where I had to admit 'I simply can't go on, I don't know where we are. 48 hours before we started to reading it. And I turned back, to do my other trick. I was on page 46, or something, and I went back to page 23 [see below]. That's 23 pages thrown away, which is a hell of a lot of play: it was nearly a third or a quarter of the play."
By mid-day on Christmas Eve, Alan realised his mistake was not only the multi-location setting of the play, but the emphasis on Lawrence and Charlotte's relationship, rather than the committee. He decided to base the play in a single location and jettisoned the Lawrence and Charlotte relationship.
Which unfortunately had an awkward knock-on effect. At the time, Alan's partner (now wife), Heather Stoney, had been offered the central role of Charlotte. She also typed the plays as he dictated them to her....
Having stopped writing to reconsider the play, he realised his mistake; which does contradict his earlier statement suggesting the cut was far more brutal.
"My mistake, I discovered, had occurred on page seven, when I foolishly chose to leave the single location and take my characters out and about."

The effect of this was to completely cut the character of Charlotte from the play. Heather was informed of this, before Alan resumed writing the play for Heather to type!
Resuming writing from  page seven, Alan wrote the entire play between Christmas Eve morning and Boxing Day night! The play's first read-through - having had to be typed with copies printed and bound - took place on 28 December evening with rehearsals commencing the next morning.

The play itself proved to be a huge success for the company, but extraordinarily - given all the effort - it was scheduled to play for just 11 days, closing on 29 January; the size of the company meant it could not be revived for the summer season.
The popularity of the plays and demand for tickets saw its run extended for a week until 5 February, but - all told - it was only performed 18 times in Scarborough.
The play also generated much interest as it was presumed that it was autobiographical and Alan had been inspired by the people he had met at many of the committee meetings. Although Alan would later suggest no characters were based on real people, at the time he was not so keen to disavow the suggestion.
"One professional committee man managed to string out the [local council] meetings for about four hours, so I wrote him into the play. Everyone recognised him. On the first night, in Scarborough, people were nudging me and saying: 'Blimey, we know who that is.' And then I saw the actual councillor in the audience. I was dreading what he would say, but he was delighted, went to see himself in the play every night. The last thing he asked me was: 'Who's going to play Me in London?'"

In Paul Allen's biography of the playwright - Grinning At The Edge - the actor Robin Herford confirmed his character, Councillor Donald Evans was based on Councillor Maurice Plow, a bank manager who had also been a member of Scarborough Theatre Trust for many years. Maurice was famous at the theatre's previous home, the Library Theatre, for leading a rebellion against Stephen Joseph's decision in 1958 to end the playing of the National Anthem after every performance; he would even resign from the board in protest before later rejoining the board.

We're taking a short break for Easter and the 60 Years articles will resume on Friday 21 April.

60 Years At The SJT: 1976

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1976
In November 1975, the Arts Council announced that the Library Theatre in Scarborough had the highest percentage attendance of any subsidised regional theatre in England.
It was a remarkable achievement and yet, despite this, the company felt unwanted and seemed to be on a precipice. In January 1975, North Yorkshire County Council had confirmed the Library Theatre must vacate Scarborough Library within twelve months.
Despite all the theatre had done for the town - which by this point was being increasingly associated with Alan Ayckbourn both nationally and internationally - it was obvious, as Alan Ayckbourn notes, things had to change.
"Conditions in the library where we spent our first twenty years were getting difficult to say the least. They'd pinched back one of the rooms, so we only had two rooms to do a repertoire of five plays in. It was very hard work and very difficult for the actors - one wash basin and all that sordidity."
Alan probably didn't help matters during the company's final months though when the Chief Librarian was reported to have arrived at work one day only to find a Morris Minor outside his first floor office, as part of the get-in for Alan Ayckbourn's latest play Just Between Ourselves! It was, as Alan noted, probably 'the final straw.'

Theoretically there was a solution on the table to the theatre's problems, but there is serious doubt as to whether anyone within the theatre really believed it would come to fruition.
During October 1975 - at a point when the company had made serious progress in securing and making plans to convert St Thomas's Church into its new home - Scarborough Town Council dramatically revealed previously secret plans for a purpose-built theatre opposite Scarborough Library on Vernon Road car park with permission to proceed approved in the same meeting.
This was surprise, if welcome news for the company, but the plans were for several years hence. The theatre would have to be built and, in the meantime, Alan had no current home for the company with the Library unwilling to consider anything but a short six month extension to its deadline.
The only solution was a short term lease offered by Scarborough Town Council for the former Westwood County Modern School, beneath Valley Bridge. It was far from ideal, but the only practical and financially viable solution.
Scarborough Theatre Trust agreed to move into Westwood - as it was colloquially known - at an estimated cost of between £20,000 - £30,000 to convert the ground floor of the building into a practical theatre space; it would actually cost £38,000 - drawn from the money being used to fund a permanent home for the company.
This - the Vernon Road theatre - was budgeted at £500,000 of which the Trust committed to raise £120,000. All was agreed and on 11 September 1976, the company performed for the final time at the Library Theatre where it had first performed on 14 July 1955.

There was now just 60 days to convert a former ground floor of a school into a working theatre!
That they did this was a remarkable achievement in itself, even though on the day of opening, Alan recalls concrete and paint still apparently drying!
"I clearly remember the first night there. Wet paint everywhere front of house and since the stage lighting board wasn’t yet connected, I had to light the show off a trailing thirteen amp lead, each lamp individually, one at a time. The result being nobody has the remotest idea what the final picture would be! Cussedly I decide to re-open the theatre with a previous failure, Mr Whatnot. Which went fine if a bit dark in places...."
The 308-seat venue opened as Theatre In The Round At Westwood on 26 October 1976 with a revival of Artistic Director Alan Ayckbourn's Mr Whatnot; one of the few plays by the playwright which had not premiered or been seen in Scarborough and which had been a notorious West End flop. It did rather better in Scarborough.

The original lease for Westwood was for just three years, but it soon became obvious there was not going to be a new permanent home for the company. Nor that Westwood wasn't going to be without its own unique problems.
"Now we're in a building - and we sighed with relief, but then they moved the Technical College in downstairs, and they do things like lead-beating classes on Tuesdays. It's absolutely deafening... They had no idea we used the theatre in the daytime at all, and we pointed out that we did rehearse. We managed to get clearance for matinee days, although they tended to forget that... It's lunatic planning, so once again we're fighting some ridiculous battle. Hardly a day goes past when I'm not on the phone to someone at the Technical College, saying: 'Excuse me, but I can't hear my dress rehearsal.' It's a most extraordinary thing."
Just months after moving in, the town council announced that the escalating costs of the proposed new theatre meant it was no longer viable; at no point was it ever explained how the budget went from £500,000 to more than £1m in less than 18 months.
This posed another problem as having agreed to move into Westwood, Alan was told in 1977 that all funding by the Arts Council would cease if it did not have a four to five year lease.
"It's ironic really, when you think that there'd be several places that would willingly give us house-rooms, and yet here we are only guaranteed another eighteen months in the building."
Westwood was not truly fit for purpose, the promised purpose-built theatre had vanished and it was fair to say, the company felt no progress had been made in the two years since January 1975. On top of that, Alan discovered the company shouldn't actually have been operating at all!
"I learnt later that we opened ‘illegally’ since after several months, we still hadn’t signed a lease with the owners, North Yorkshire County Council."
This highlighted the disparity between the town and county councils. The latter had never really appreciated how significant the theatre and Alan had become to both Scarborough's economy and reputation and which the Town Council were loathe to lose.
In a tacit acknowledgement the company would have to make the best of a bad situation, on 1 April 1978, Westwood was renamed the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round in memory of its founder; a name that was initially planned for the new permanent home for the company.

The following year, the Westwood lease was extended to 10 years and a grant of £105,000 from the local authority, English Tourist Board and the Arts Council offered an opportunity to make the building fit for purpose. A rehearsal room was finally created alongside a costume store, extra offices and other improvements including air conditioning in the main auditorium.
It was a home of sorts and would become, despite all its quirks, a theatre embraced by Scarborough audiences. What was intended as a home for no more than three years instead lasted for 20 years from 1976 to 1996.
Despite everything, Alan had overcome his first truly major challenge as Artistic Director. He had secured a home foe the company and successfully guided it through every obstacle thrown at him.
He now needed to establish the space and make it not only a worthy successor to the Library Theatre, but a success in its own right.
So began the work that within the decade would see the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round recognised as one of the most successful and significant regional theatres in the UK.

60 Years At The SJT: 1975

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Alan Ayckbourn joining the Library Theatre, Scarborough, in 1957. Alan has been indelibly associated with the company since that time as actor, writer, director and Artistic Director.

60 Years At The SJT: 1975
1975 marked a significant point in Alan Ayckbourn's writing and directing career with a play that still stands as one of his most popular and successful creations.
The play was Bedroom Farce and it marked a notable first for Scarborough, the Library Theatre and Alan Ayckbourn.

Although it premiered at the Library Theatre, Bedroom Farce was commissioned by the National Theatre, making Bedroom Farce the first play written and premiered in Scarborough to be produced at the NT.
The play had come about as a result of the NT's Artistic Director, Peter Hall, becoming an admirer of Alan's work and eager for him to write for the venue's new home on London's South Bank, which opened in 1975. As he wrote to Alan at the time, 'You may be able to do without the National Theatre but can the National Theatre do without you?'
Alan was formally approached in January 1974 to provide a play for the Lyttelton auditorium as part of the National Theatre’s first season. Alan agreed and provided Peter Hall with a title for the play at least a year in advance of actually writing it.
Although Alan would not write the play until May 1975, an interview with the Sunday Times in June 1974 confirmed he already had some firm ideas. “I’m going to call it Bedroom Farce, A Comedy. I’m worrying about it a bit because I’ve never written for the posh fellers before. It’ll have everything about bedrooms but copulation, something which I believe is hardly practiced in the British bedroom anyway.”
The title was later shortened to just Bedroom Farce, but commenting on the original title Alan noted: “I thought I’d confuse the issue.” Later he may have regretted not keeping the title when some critics took issue with the fact Bedroom Farce was not really a farce, despite Alan never describing the play as such. Indeed he has always described the play itself as a comedy: "It's a comedy though it's called a farce."
Crucially, Hall agreed that Alan could premiere the play at the Library Theatre in Scarborough, before it transferred to the National Theatre.

Despite the long lead-in, Alan was still writing to the latest possible deadline and, as Peter Hall's biography recalls, it was a particularly tense time for playwright and production given the playwright was writing in London.
“It [Bedroom Farce] was due to rehearse on a Monday; he started writing it on the previous Wednesday, wrote all day Wednesday and most of the night, all day Thursday and most of the night, all day Friday and most of the night; on Saturday he typed it out, and on Sunday armed with some duplicated copies he drove up to Scarborough. He gave it to the cast on Monday morning, and after the reading collapsed in bed for two days. He said this was the kind of pressure he needed, and usually induced, to write a play.”
Despite this, rehearsals went well although the production itself was not without issues. Alan had written Bedroom Farce to cope with the particular design challenges of the Lyttelton at the NT in mind; namely a wide, quite thin stage. His solution was three bedrooms which would be placed side-by-side.
He had intended for Scarborough though - as always - to stage the play in the round. However, legend has it that Alan hadn't realised just how large double beds were. The set, as planned, would not fit in the Concert Room at the Library Theatre, so Alan quickly re-designed it for a three-sided / thrust  staging. He would not actually direct it in the round as he had planned until a revival of the play in 2000 at the Stephen Joseph Theatre.

Bedroom Farce opened at the Library Theatre, Scarborough, on 16 June 1975 and was, commercially, very successful. Reviews were mixed though with some of the broadsheets having particular issues with the characters of Trevor and Susannah.

The play was a hit though and soon to become more popular than the author could ever have imagined. The NT production, having been moved back from 1975 to 1977, saw Alan directing for the first time in London. The production opened on 16 March 1977 and was met with an effusive reaction by the critics. The vast majority of the reviews were positive and most of the original concerns were forgotten; although Alan had made next to no alterations to the script.

By April 1978, Bedroom Farce had become the NT's longest running show in repertoire and during its first year was seen by 140,429 paying audience members. Such was the play’s success, the NT decided to transfer it to the West End in association with Michael Codron. Initially scheduled for an 11 week run - later extended, Bedroom Farce opened with a new cast at the Prince Of Wales Theatre on 7 November 1978.
By the time it closed on 29 September 1979, it had become the second longest running London production of an Ayckbourn  play following Absurd Person Singular, which it still retains today. It has become one of the most perennially popular and re-staged of Alan's plays.
Scarborough's hit-maker had now conquered both the West End and the National Theatre, but one of his biggest challenges was still to come.
Finding a new home for the Scarborough company.