Alan Ayckbourn Libri

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.

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.

Meet three couples in their three kitchens on the Christmas Eves of three successive years. The "lower class" but very much up and coming Hopcrofts are in their bright new, gadget-filled kitchen anxiously giving a little party for their bank manager and his wife and an architect neighbor. Next, there are the architect and his wife in their neglected, untidy flat. Then the bank manager and his wife are in their large, slightly modernized, old Victorian style kitchen. Running like a dark thread through the wild comedy of behind-the-scenes disasters at Christmas parties is the story of the advance of the Hopcrofts to material prosperity and independence and the decline of the others. In the final stages, the little man is well and truly on top, with the others, literally and unnervingly, dancing to his tune.

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.

Includes the plays Absurd Person Singular, Absent Friends, and Bedroom Farce.

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.

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.

Colin must be comforted in his grief over the death of his fiancée so his friends, who never met the girl, arrange a tea party for him. Understandably they are on edge wondering what to say, but there is more to their Diane and Paul, John and Evelyn, and Marge and her husband are perpetually out of circulation with trivial illnesses are all kept together by a mixture of business and cross-marital emotional ties. By the time Colin arrives for tea, their tenseness contrasts dramatically with his air of cheerful relaxation. He is the only happy one among them and his happiness and insensitive analyses of their troubles causes each of them to break down.

Being the cautionary tale of Guy, a man who couldn't say no to wine, women or song - and of his consequent rise and fall in the world of amateur operatics."...a serious comic masterpiece: brilliantly constructed, ruthlessly observant, hilarious and hard as nails." John Peter, Sunday Times."...a magnificent comedy: symmetrically shaped, psychologically acute and painfully, heartbreakingly funny." Michael Billington, The Guardian."...humour, pathos and unnerving insight into human idiosyncrasy." Francis King, Sunday Telegraph.

In this comedic morality play by Alan Ayckbourn, Jack McCraken, newly appointed head of a family furniture business, aims to bring honesty and integrity. However, he soon discovers that the other stakeholders have their own hidden agendas, leading to humorous and satirical situations.

Ein Stück über den manipulativen Einfluss der Massenmedien und die Gier des Publikums nach Sensation. Um sich zu profilieren konfrontiert eine ehrgeizige Fernsehjournalistin einen Ex-Bankräuber mit seinem Opfer.

Unverzichtbares Handbuch für jeden, der sich für das Schreiben und Inszenieren von Theaterstücken interessiert. Alan Ayckbourn, einer der meistgespielten Theaterautoren der Gegenwart, gibt zum ersten Mal Einblick in alle Kunstgriffe seines Handwerks. Von nützlichen Ratschlägen zum Schreiben (Wo fängt man an? Wie macht man weiter? Was ist eine Komödie? Was funktioniert eine Tragödie?) bis zu Tipps für das Regieführen (Arbeit mit Schauspielern und Technikern, wie bekommt man die Proben in den Griff) ist das Buch ein vollständiger Leitfaden für Anfänger wie auch ein Auffrischungslehrgang für den Fortgeschrittenen. Eingängig und ungemein unterhaltsam geschrieben, mit einer Vielzahl an Anekdoten zum Wie, Wann, Wo und vor allem Warum. In zwei Teile untergliedert 'Schreiben' und 'Inszenieren', enthält das Buch eine ausführliche Anleitung über das Entwerfen eines Theaterstücks. Klar geschrieben, mit nützlichen Beispielen und einer Reihe von Anekdoten, decken seine 101 Regeln alles ab, von der 'Initialidee', über das Schreiben und Erstellen von Plots, Schauplätzen, Figuren und Dialogen, bis hin zum Umgang mit 'Stars', Produzenten, schwierigen Schauspielern, exzentrischen Bühnentechnikern und der Presse.