A Chorus of Disapproval (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Alan Ayckbourn was born April 12, 1939, in the London suburb of Hampstead. His parents divorced in 1943, and his mother, a writer of romantic fiction, later remarried. Ayckbourn grew up in Sussex, which he features as the setting for many of his plays. During high school he devoted most of his time to acting in and writing plays. At the age of seventeen he left school and started a career in the theater. After a few years working as an assistant stage manager and actor for Sir Donald Wolfit’s touring company, Ayckbourn began a fruitful relationship with the Studio Theater Company in Scarborough, a small resort town in the South of England.

There, Ayckbourn worked for Stephen Joseph, an innovative stage manager who had introduced the concept of theater-in-the-round to England. (Ayckbourn modeled the character of Llewellyn in A Chorus of Disapproval on Joseph.) Ayckbourn soon started writing plays for the company. He left to work as a drama producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). After Joseph’s death in 1970, Ayckbourn returned to Scarborough to become the company’s director of productions. He renamed the theater the Stephen Joseph Theater-in-the-Round.

In 1997, Ayckbourn fought a protracted battle with the Scarborough Town Council over funding for the faltering theater. He himself had already contributed 400, 000 pounds from his own pocket, which was topped by a two million pound grant from the British National Lottery. He requested a five-year, 50, 000 pound per year grant. The dispute was dubbed the battle of the “luvvies versus lavvies,” because opponents of Ayckbourn’s request claimed that funding the theater would necessitate closing the town’s public toilets. Ayckbourn fought a public relations campaign; when he was knighted by the Queen later that year, he won the battle. The Scarborough public toilets also managed to stayed open.

Ayckbourn writes light comedies about middle class morals and manners. His first major success was Relatively Speaking, which opened in March, 1967, around the same time that Tom Stoppard’s more structurally innovative absurdist farce Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead opened at the National Theater. For some time, Ayckbourn’s adherence to the genre of light comedy damaged his reputation in comparison to innovators such as Stoppard, Harold Pinter (The Birthday Party), and Joe Orton (What the Butler Saw). But he has always been popular with audiences, and critics have gradually come to praise his dramatic talents.

Ayckbourn has now written more plays than Shakespeare, and, according to Simon Trussler in the Cambridge Illustrated Hisory of the British Theatre, his sell-out seasons at the National Theater demonstrate a box-office appeal “unequalled since Shakespeare.” He has also written a great many adaptations for the stage (including an acclaimed version of Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky’s play The Forest [1870] staged at the National Theater in the mid- 1990s). He is also a respected director; he directed the premiere of A Chorus of Disapproval in 1984, and in 1987 he directed an awardwinning production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge.