Алан Эйкборн

The leading lights of the village have decided to hold a pageant of local history based on a somewhat vague event, "The Massacre of the Pendon Twelve". But there's a young left wing teacher on the committee who decides to turn it into a rally for proletarian revolution. Committee meetings become symbolic battlefields for conflicting views - the right wing faction being led by the Chairman&#03...

'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 m...

The play Henceforward... is the first comedy in which Alan Ayckbourn includes elements of science fiction. It concerns Jerome, a composer, who develops a plan to persuade his estranged wife Corinna that his home life is sufficiently stable for her to allow their daughter to stay with him. The plan involves both an actress and a gynoid (the female equivalent of an android). The play is in two ac...

Six aspiring authors meet on a winter's evening to discuss their work. Among them are writers of historical romances and children's literature who are finding it difficult to start writing, and a crime writer who can't stop. A creator of extremely complicated science fiction, a librettist without a musical partner and the Writer's Circle chairman, who produces instruction bookl...

Пять друзей устраивают субботнее чаепитие, на которое приглашают своего приятеля Колина, с которым давно не виделись, в надежде утешить его — у Колина два месяца назад утонула невеста. Отвечая на заботу друзей, Колин безжалостно вскрывает их собственные несчастья. Это сатирическая история о проблемах богатых людей, общения в их кругу и полной недоразумений жизни.

Ayckbourn's series of five interlocked plays typify his black comedies of human behavior in recognizable and absurd domestic situations. First produced in 1976, the plays are alternately naturalistic, stylized and farcical, but underlying each is the problem of loneliness and characters who suffer the result of being ignored. The Mother Figure shows a mother unable to escape from baby talk...

This ingenious comedy is about two sisters and the choices they make (or have made for them) over a few months. There are four versions that can be done on different evenings, each stemming from one random and one deliberate choice. The story starts with a funeral at which Dorcas, Abigail and Simon solve a dilemma by tossing a coin: either Dorcas or Abigail wins the toss and goes with Simon. Later...

The leading lights of the village have decided to hold a pageant of local history based on a somewhat vague event, "The Massacre of the Pendon Twelve". But there's a young left wing teacher on the committee who decides to turn it into a rally for proletarian revolution. Committee meetings become symbolic battlefields for conflicting views - the right wing faction being led by the Chairman&#03...

'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 m...

The play Henceforward... is the first comedy in which Alan Ayckbourn includes elements of science fiction. It concerns Jerome, a composer, who develops a plan to persuade his estranged wife Corinna that his home life is sufficiently stable for her to allow their daughter to stay with him. The plan involves both an actress and a gynoid (the female equivalent of an android). The play is in two ac...

Six aspiring authors meet on a winter's evening to discuss their work. Among them are writers of historical romances and children's literature who are finding it difficult to start writing, and a crime writer who can't stop. A creator of extremely complicated science fiction, a librettist without a musical partner and the Writer's Circle chairman, who produces instruction bookl...

Пять друзей устраивают субботнее чаепитие, на которое приглашают своего приятеля Колина, с которым давно не виделись, в надежде утешить его — у Колина два месяца назад утонула невеста. Отвечая на заботу друзей, Колин безжалостно вскрывает их собственные несчастья. Это сатирическая история о проблемах богатых людей, общения в их кругу и полной недоразумений жизни.