Alan Ayckbourn Books

Time of My Life charts the decline and fall of a successful family business founded and nurtured by Gerry and Laura Stratton. It is Laura's fifty-fourth birthday and Gerry has organized a small family dinner at their favourite restaurant. Domestically, all seems well. Glyn, their eldest son, has patched up his marriage with Stephanie; younger son Adam has a new girlfriend and is deeply in love. But, as we suspect, all this is surface stuff. For, as their evening proceeds, the play reveals skeletons from the past and a spectre of the future.

Adrian is about to introduce his fiancée Grace to his parents at a birthday party, but they are worried that Grace doesn't know about Adrian's alleged reputation. As more birthdays unfold, the truth about the suburban closet Lothario is revealed...

A comedy in four parts about an unremarkable man and the remarkable women who loved him. From his first encounters as a young man in 1925 to an unexpected reunion late in life, Anthony Spates' romantic progress is charted against the backdrop of an equally remarkable old manor house in this hilarious and gently touching comedy.

Two people contemplating suicide, Henry Bell, who's lost his job to a rival, and Karen Knightly, who's lost her lover to his wife, decide to obtain revenge on each other's nemesis

How Ms Poopay Dayseer, a twenty-first century Specialist Sexual Consultant, whilst peddling her 'services' to an elderly hotel room client unexpectedly finds herself running for her life.

Stanley, Hazel, Warren and Rick make the weekly escape from their real life nightmares into a role-playing board game peopled by dragons and monsters. A safe world where the dangers are of their own imagining; where they are free to become heroes of their own devising.But how clear is the dividing line between what they choose to be and what they really are? What would it take for them to lose sight of it altogether?All it requires is Marcie. Loveable, understanding, sympathetic Marcie - destined to become the new demon to haunt their wildest dreams.

Now we don't want to start Christmas like this, do we? Cheating at snakes and ladders, fighting over comic books, a bungled infidelity beneath the tree. Christmas has arrived in the Bunker household along with family and friends. But as the children lurk just out of sight, it's the adults who are letting the side down. I couldn't.

A scathing comedy of social striving in the suburbs, Absurd Person Singular follows the fortunes of three couples who turn up in each other’s kitchens on three successive Christmases, to hilarious and devastating effect. In Absent Friends , Diana and Paul host a tea party for Colin, recently returned to England after the tragic drowning of his fianc”e. But Colin proves impervious to their awkward attempts to console him as he unwittingly touches every raw nerve in the troubled lives of his old friends. The action of Bedroom Farce unfolds simultaneously—and uproariously—in the onstage bedrooms of three couples all in some way connected to an utterly self-absorbed fourth couple who heedlessly intrude on their friends’ privacy, leaving chaos in their wake.

This is a student edition of five one-act plays by Britain's most popular playwright. Ayckbourn's series of plays for 4-5 actors typify his black comedies of human behaviour. The plays are alternately naturalistic, stylised and farcical, but underlying each is the problem of loneliness. The Mother Figure shows a mother unable to escape from baby talk; in The Drinking Companion, an absentee husband attempts seduction without success; in Between Mouthfuls, a waiter oversees a fraught dinner encounter. A garden party gets out of hand in Gosforth's Fete, whilst A Talk in the Park is a revue style curtain call piece for the five actors. Whether the comedies concern marital conflict, infidelity or motherhood and take place on a park bench or at a village fete, the characters are familiar and their cries for help instantly recognisable. Principally he is respected as a radical re-inventor of form - Dominic Dromgoole.