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Alan Ayckbourn

Shows · Alan Ayckbourn

LyricistBook WriterDirector b. 1939

Sir Alan Ayckbourn (born 12 April 1939) is a prolific British playwright and director. As of 2025, he has written and produced 91 full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967. Major successes include Absurd Person Singular (1972), The Norman Conquests trilogy (1973), Absent Friends (1974), Bedroom Farce (1975), Just…

Also credited on1 work

By Jeeves

These come off the person record, which names a work and not a production. So we can say this name is attached to the work and we cannot say which staging, or in what capacity. For a composer or a writer that is the whole career we hold; there is no cast list to find them in.

In the literature8 passages

  • After the failure of the first version of the more traditional Jeeves (1975; revised as By Jeeves in 1996) with the playwright Alan Ayckbourn, the following year Lloyd Webber and Rice produced another two-record concept album in a mixture of rock and Latin styles based on the stormy life and early death of Eva Peron, the controversial and…ebooks/Block, Geoffrey/Enchanted Evenings_The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber - Geoffrey Block.txt
  • Perhaps he even needed the work; the year before, he’d appeared in How the Other Half Loves, a short-lived Alan Ayckbourn play (is there any other kind in New York?) in which he played someone uncharacteristically nice and sincere.ebooks/Filichia, Peter/B007L4OWCU EBOK - Peter Filichia.txt
  • By Jeeves (1996, lyrics and book by Alan Ayckbourn, based on stories by P. G. Wodehouse, reworking of Jeeves (1975))ebooks/Music, The Cambridge Companion To The Musical Cambridge Companions To/Cambridge Companion to the Musical (Cambridge Companions to Music), The - The Cambridge Companion To The Musical Cambridge Companions To Music.txt
  • Sondheim was in London when his mother died and did not return for the funeral. Alan Ayckbourn recalled the occasion and remembered Sondheim saying that he did not want the usual expressions of sympathy because he did not need them. His feelings had not changed since the time when, writing to Henry and Mary Guettel, he had said, “ Thanks…ebooks/Secrest, Meryle/Stephen Sondheim - Meryle Secrest.txt
  • The Norman Conquests , an import from the Old Vic Theatre in London, was comprised of three separate plays by Alan Ayckbourn, each taking place in a different area of a house, during one dinner party. With the subtitles “Table Manners,” “Round and Round the Garden” and “Living Together,” each third of the piece stood on its own, but also…ebooks/Tepper, Jennifer/Untold Stories of Broadway, Volume 2 PART 1, The - Jennifer Tepper.txt
  • 67 Absurd Person Singular is a play by Alan Ayckbourn that opened on Broadway on October 8, 1974.ebooks/Unknown/Alan Jay Lerner_ A Lyricist's Letters - Unknown.txt

Passages naming this person, found by keyword across 178 books. A keyword match is not a biography, and a common name will pull in the wrong one.

What this page does not know

  • What this person played. No cast list we hold records a character against a performer.
  • Any staging. This name appears in no production cast list we hold — 1,877 of 7,139 people are in that position, most of them writers, composers and designers rather than performers.
  • Which of the credits above the roles on this record — lyricist, book writer, director — apply to. The roles sit on the person and never on a credit, so a director who also acted looks the same here as one who did not.

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