Feature: Past/Present/Future for … Alan Ayckbourn

Alan Ayckbourn will be seventy this April and, although he has physically slowed down since his stroke three years ago, getting about with the aid of a stick and his constant companion and second wife Heather Stoney, he shows no signs of slowing down on the work front. He has a full diary for the next two years, starting with this week's opening of his own revival from Scarborough of Woman in Mind starring Janie Dee at the Vaudeville, the theatre where the play first opened in London in 1985. Sir Alan retired last year as the artistic director of the “in the round” Stephen Joseph Theatre he has run, in three separate buildings, in his adopted Yorkshire home town, since 1967.

He has written seventy-two full-length plays including Relatively Speaking (1965), The Norman Conquests (1972), Bedroom Farce (1975), A Chorus of Disapproval (1984), Man of the Moment (1988), Communicating Doors (1994), House and Garden (1999) and Private Fears in Public Places (2004). His plays have been translated into more than thirty languages. He was made CBE in 1987 and knighted in 1997, the first living dramatist to be so honoured since Noel Coward. The new Stephen Joseph Theatre opened in a converted art deco Odeon cinema near the railway station in 1996.

Full published article at: http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=207&story=E8831233772178

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