Download or read book Alan Ayckbourn Plays 5 written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Snake in the Grass A terrific piece - brilliant, bizarre and yet totally believable . . . In fact, it's more than classic; it's close to the top of its class. Yorkshire Post If I Were You A blissfully funny comedy that's also filled with sadness, a devilishly simple theatrical idea that spins out all kinds of complex truths about human nature. Daily Telegraph Life and Beth A wise, humane, funny play about the inevitability of death and the continuity of life. Guardian My Wonderful Day A transformation happens as magical as the most magnificent pantomime transformation anyone could ever imagine . . . the playwright dissolves the paraphernalia of our adult selves and uncovers that space inside each of us that is still the child we once were. Observer Life of Riley As perceptive as ever . . . Ayckbourn has once again achieved a satisfyingly rich, tragi-comic complexity. Daily Telegraph
Download or read book Comic Potential written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 2002 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A play set in the foreseeable future when everything has changed except human nature; a future where TV daytime soaps are performed by android actors emotionally programmed by the control room. One, JC 31333, finds herself humanized as Jacie Triplethree, complete with a sense of humour and Adam, a young scriptwriter, falls for her.
Download or read book Woman in Mind written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central character of Alan Ayckbourn's new play is Susan, a parson's wife, 'one of the most moving and devastating that he has created...' Robin Thornber reviewing the first production in Scarborough in the Guardian.
Download or read book A Small Family Business written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 1992 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack McCraken has the opportunity of a lifetime: he is the new head of a family furniture business and believes he will initiate a new age of honesty and integrity. He quickly learns that everyone else involved in the enterprise has a vested interest in maintaining business as usual, rife with dishonesty and deceit "--
Download or read book Confusions written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. First produced in 1976, 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
Download or read book Table Manners written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 1975 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this play, Annie has arranged to spend an illicit weekend with her sister Ruth's husband Norman, and for this reason, suitably disguised, has asked her elder brother Reg and his wife Sarah to look after their widowed mother and the house. As it happens the seduction, thought or planned, by each of the six characters never takes place either"--Publisher's website.
Download or read book Communicating Doors written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 1999 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intricate time traveling comic thriller by the British master of farcical comedy delighted London and New York audiences. A London sex specialist from the future stumbles into a murder plot that sends her, compliments of a unique set of hotel doors, traveling back in time. She and two women who were murdered in 1998 and 1978 race back and forth in time trying to rewrite history and prevent their own violent ends. The frantic race begins when Poopay is hired for an evening at the Regal Hotel by an old man who eschews a fling in favor of confessing his role in the demise of his wives. Now a target, Poopay flees into the vestibule and somehow triggers the time machine. -- Publisher's website.
Download or read book The Crafty Art of Playmaking written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Crafty Art of Playmaking, this seminal guide from renowned playwright Alan Ayckbourn shares his tricks of the trade. From helpful hints on writing to tips on directing, this book provides a complete primer for the newcomer and a refresher for those with more experience. Written in Ayckbourn's signature style that combines humor, seriousness, and a heady air of sophistication, The Crafty Art of Playmaking is a must-have for aspiring playwrights, students of drama, and anyone who has ever laughed their way through one of Ayckbourn's plays.
Download or read book Callisto written by Torsten Krol and published by Picador Australia. This book was released on 2007-11-10 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My name is Odell Deefus. I am a white person, not black like you might think from hearing the name and not seeing me. If you did see me, you wouldn't remember me for my face, which isn't the kind to stick in anyone's mind, but you might remember me for being tall. I am six-three, which makes women attracted to me, then they find out I don't talk the kind of talk they like to hear, so there goes the romance before it even started. You have to be able to talk to get anywhere. Me, I have to think awhile before I talk, but in the meantime the conversation has moved on, as they say, so forget that. I have had this difficulty all my life, with bad consequences." This blackly funny novel of our times follows what happens when Odell Deefus takes one wrong turn on the journey of his life and crashes into a world of oddballs, misfits, drug-dealers, religious fanatics and crooked cops, hypocrisy, torture and bloody murder. In Callisto, Odell Deefus discovers a vast web of corruption and deceit leading to the dark heart of America.
Download or read book Season s Greetings written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-12-02 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Not in our sitting-room. Not in front of the television. Somewhere else. Presiding over the festivities are two warring uncles, one a kindly, incompetent doctor with an interminable puppet show to perform; the other a bullying retired security guard who dominates the TV, brings toy guns for his nieces and determines there's a thief in their midst. Alan Ayckbourn's masterly Season's Greetings offers a seriously entertaining look at the misery and high jinks of an average family Christmas. The play opens at the National Theatre, London, in December 2010.Three times I caught him at it. Ripping open presents, helping himself to the contents.
Download or read book Damsels in Distress written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-05-16 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a trilogy of plays by the most performed playwright in the world, all set in a flat in Docklands. Lynette's teenage daughter comes up with a surprising way to save the family finances. A night of passion takes a mysterious and dangerous turn. An important family occasion is thrown into chaos by the arrival of some uninvited guests.
Download or read book Roleplay written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by . This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Justin and Julie-Ann, hopelessly mismatched in love, are about to introduce their respective parents to each other over dinner - Justin's upper-crust alcoholic mother from Surrey and Julie-Ann's bigoted Yorkshire father and prim mother. Into this doomed scenario drops, literally, via the balcony upstairs and the river, Paige Petite, a former lap-dancer with suicidal tendencies and her thick, gun-toting minder who is employed by her violent boyfriend...
Download or read book Three Plays Absurd Person Singular Absent Friends Bedroom Farce written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'What is remarkable about Alan Ayckbourn's comedy is that it contrives to be simultaneously hilarious and harrowing. Literally, it is agonisingly funny' Daily Telegraph In Three Plays Ayckbourn's perfectly pitched dialogue slices into the soul of suburbia. The settings are simple - a kitchen, a bedroom, a party - but the relationships between the husbands and wives are more complicated. Fraught relationships are exposed with humour, bathos and a sharp understanding of human nature.
Download or read book Way Upstream written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by London ; New York : S. French. This book was released on 1983 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What could be more pleasant than cruising through the picturesque English countryside? This voyage combines the comedy touches that make Ayckbourn one of the world's best loved playwrights with a darker thread of menace.-4 women, 3 men
Download or read book Henceforward written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: England's comic master is in a black comic mode in this West End hit about our fascination with technology. It is sometime quite soon in a steel shuttered, slovenly flat in a no go area of North London where punks rule deserted streets. Here, a lonely composer sits surrounded by high tech equipment. His only company is a robot nanny, and she's on the blink. He desperately wants to reclaim his teenage daughter and enlists an out of work actress to implement a cunning plan he's evolved to impress his estranged wife and a wired for sound child welfare officer. When things don't work out, Jerome has to improvise... It's amazing what can be done with new micro chips and a screwdriver
Download or read book A Chorus of Disapproval written by and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presented by Independent Theatre; directed by Rob Croser; play by Alan Ayckbourn.
Download or read book Arrivals and Departures written by Alan Ayckbourn and published by Samuel French Limited. This book was released on 2019-01-28 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A terrorist code-named Cerastes is on the loose, and an undercover anti-terrorist squad have planned a sting to capture him as he steps off a train at a London station. The operation, led by the buffoonish Acting Major Quentin Sexton, has drawn in two outsiders - Ez and Barry. Perfect strangers as the play begins, their time waiting for the trap to be sprung gives them the chance to get to know each other, and try to make sense of the chaos unfolding around them.
