Alan Ayckbourn

Sir Alan Ayckbourn in 2010

Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE (born 12 April 1939) is one of England's most prolific and commercially successful comic playwrights.

Quotes

• Few women care to be laughed at and men not at all, except for large sums of money.
  • Preface to The Norman Conquests (New York: Grove Press, [1975] 1988) p. 11.
• There are very few people on top of life, and the rest of us don't like them very much.
  • Newsweek (25 March 1979).
• A comedy is just a tragedy interrupted, I once said. Do you finish with the kiss or when she opens her eyes to tell him she loves him and sees blonde hairs on his collar?
  • "A Crash Course in Playwriting" (1993) [1].
• The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa.
  • The Crafty Art of Playwriting (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) p. 3.
• They've started this filthy floodlit cricket with cricketers wearing tin hats and advertisements for contraceptives on their boots.
  • A Gardener in Love, Intimate Exchanges (1982).

About Ayckbourn

• Plays by Alan Ayckbourn have been attracting larger audiences in the regional theatres than those of Shakespeare.
  • Press release by the Arts Council of Great Britain (2 November 1983).
  • Reputed to be the source of the common, but unsubstantiated, statement that Ayckbourn is the second most performed playwright after Shakespeare. [2]