SCARBOROUGH, England On any given day, Alan Ayckbourn can be sure that at least one of his 70-plus works is being performed somewhere on the globe. Ayckbourn — Sir Alan since 1997 — is considered a national treasure in Britain.
His star waxes and wanes in the rest of the world, but never disappears entirely. In the mid-1970s he had four plays onstage simultaneously on Broadway. In 2010 he was back in Manhattan to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Tonys.
Ayckbourn writes comedies that are funny and touching by turns, full of people rarely bigger than life, but who are engaging, lovingly drawn and, for all their Britishness, universally familiar. His best-known works include A Chorus of Disapproval, Absurd Person Singular and Communicating Doors.
You’d think that such a vital force in the theatrical world would live in London.
Instead, for virtually all his four-decades-plus career, he’s been based far to the north, in the coastal Yorkshire city of Scarborough.
Scarborough (pop. 50,000), once upon a time, was a well-to-do spa town. People came to take the waters and breath the sea air. But in the early 20th century it lost its allure.
The spa turned off its tap in the 1930s when the water was declared unfit. It still has the ruins of its magnificent, 12th-century castle, atop a headland, but its Grand Hotel, once Europe’s finest, has been taken over by bus tour groups, and its South Bay beachfront is lined with arcades and fast-food joints.
Ayckbourn moved here because his mentor, Stephen Joseph, was running a small, regional theatre. But after Ayckbourn’s plays began to transfer regularly to London’s West End — as more than half of his plays have — why did he stay?
“It’s the right size of town for me,” he says, and “it’s a very nice place to live.” People leave him alone. (“They’re Yorkshire people. If you just keep walking with your head down, they all respect your silence.”) Perhaps more to the point, Ayckbourn is an admitted control freak, and in Scarborough he’s got to run his own show as director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre.
Every year he writes at least one new play for the theatre and, once he does, “I have to go through a committee of people approving it, and the committee is me.”
That would not happen in a London or a New York.
Ayckbourn is also a devotee of theatre-in-the-round, pioneered by Joseph, whose ideas are embodied in the playhouse bearing his name.
“He decreed so many seats and the space had to be so big,” says Ayckbourn. “Which is what makes it really work as a theatre, I think. The relationship between the audience and the playing space.”
Once in a while Sir Alan goes down to London, more rarely to New York. Mainly, he stays home. If you want to catch a glimpse of him, your best bet is the Lanterna Ristorante at 33 Queen Street. That’s where he goes to celebrate every time he finishes a new play — which, in his case, is quite often.
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