In 1957, Ayckbourn married Christine Roland, another member of the Library Theatre company, and indeed Ayckbourn's first two plays were written jointly with her under the pseudonym of " Roland Allen ".

One side-effect of the timing is that, as Alan was awarded a knighthood a few months before the divorce, both his first and second wife are entitled to take the title of Lady Ayckbourn.

Ayckbourn joined Wolfit on tour to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as an acting assistant stage manager ( meaning a role that involved both acting and stage management ) for three weeks, with his first role on the professional stage being various parts in The Strong are Lonely by Fritz Hochwälder .< ref name = acting >

She worked in repertory theatres across the UK for the first 11 years of her career, performing in over a hundred plays, playing everything from Alan Ayckbourn to Shakespeare.

In the first ten years of his career he directed more than sixty productions in London and throughout the UK – from Alan Ayckbourn to Rene de Obaldia, and Pam Gems to Athol Fugard.

* In 1984 in the play ( and later film ) A Chorus of Disapproval by Alan Ayckbourn, an amateur production of The Beggar's Opera is a major plot driver and excerpts are performed.

* Confusions, a 1974 play by Alan Ayckbourn

* Neighbourhood Watch ( Ayckbourn play ), a 2011 play written by Alan Ayckbourn

He directed adaptations of the Alan Ayckbourn musical play A Chorus of Disapproval with Anthony Hopkins and the Agatha Christie novel Appointment with Death in 1988.

The Alan Ayckbourn play Woman in Mind received its American premiere Off-Broadway in February 1988 at the Manhattan Theatre Club.

* Body Language ( play ), a 1990 play by Alan Ayckbourn

Way Upstream is a play by Alan Ayckbourn.

* " A Midnight Mass ", a scene in the play Intimate Exchanges by Alan Ayckbourn

* The Sparrow ( 1967 play ), by Alan Ayckbourn

* 1998 Michael Williams starred as John Aubrey in the one-man play Brief Lives, Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon played for ten weeks in the RSC ’ s The Unexpected Man and Michael Codron and Lee Dean transferred their production of Alan Ayckbourn ’ s Things We Do for Love from the Gielgud.

His father, Horace Ayckbourn, was an orchestral violinist, at one time deputy leader of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Ayckbourn, however, continues to write and direct his own work at the theatre.

Among these were House and Garden, a 2002 Alan Ayckbourn production held at the Manhattan Theatre Club, in which she portrayed a disdainful, flirtatious teen.

The London première was at the proscenium Lyttelton Theatre on 4 October 1982, with Ayckbourn again directing.

* The Revengers Comedies, at the Strand Theatre, written and directed by Sir Alan Ayckbourn

In the summer of 2008, he played in repertory in Scarborough, North Yorkshire at the Stephen Joseph Theatre under the artistic direction of Alan Ayckbourn.

Having trained at LAMDA, he started his career by assisting directors such as Alan Ayckbourn, Eric Thompson, Frank Hauser and Michael Blakemore ; however, he has been directing plays in his own right since the age of seventeen.

premieres held at the theatre include < i > The Westwoods </ i > by Alan Ayckbourn, < i > Between The Lines </ i > by Paul Todd and < i > Blue Jam </ i > by Chris Morris.

Ayckbourn attended Haileybury, in the village of Hertford Heath, and while there toured Europe and America with the school's Shakespeare company.

Skinner has worked with directors that include Mike Leigh, Trevor Nunn, Tim Burton and Sam Mendes, but she remembers one particular director, Alan Ayckbourn, when she started out: " He was a great influence for me as he pushed me so hard, but every director you work with has a big influence in some way, they really push you .”

Ayckbourn was born in Hampstead, London.

Alan Ayckbourn said that his relationship with Christine became easy once they agreed their marriage was over.

Like his mother, neither he nor Christine sought a divorce for the next thirty years and it was only in 1997 that they formally divorced ; Ayckbourn married Heather Stoney.

Both characters feel themselves in trouble, and there was speculation that Alan Ayckbourn himself may have felt himself to be in trouble.

In the Plays and Players Yearbook for 1993 he was calculated as the third most performed playwright in the UK behind William Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn.

His mother was Marie Anne d ' Estrées († 1741 ), daughter Abigail Ayckbourn of Marshal Jean II d ' Estrées ( 1624 – 1707 ) and younger sister of Marshal Victor Marie d ' Estrées.

It was directed by Alan Ayckbourn and Michael Gambon gave an acclaimed performance as Eddie.

Thompson was fired just before the opening, so Ayckbourn himself stepped into the fray, aided by choreographer Christopher Bruce.

However, a permanent home proved difficult to find and it was not until late 1988 and the closure of the local Odeon cinema by Rank Leisure that the theatre's long-standing Artistic Director, Alan Ayckbourn, found a suitable venue.

The 2011 college production was A Chorus of Disapproval by Alan Ayckbourn.

Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE ( born 12 April 1939 ) is a prolific English playwright.

It is said that Joseph became both a mentor and father figure for Ayckbourn until his untimely death in 1967, and he has consistently spoken highly of him.

Although Ayckbourn continued to move where his career took him, he settled in Scarborough, eventually buying Longwestgate House, the house formerly owned by Stephen Joseph.

Ayckbourn has frequently said he sees aspects of himself in all his characters.

But again, it is unclear whether this had any effect on the writing, and Paul Allen's view is that it is not current experience that Ayckbourn uses for his plays.

It could be that Ayckbourn had written plays with himself and his own issues in mind, but as Ayckbourn is portrayed as a guarded and private man, it is hard to imagine him exposing his own life in his plays to any great degree.

After an excursion into the world of comic-books and cartoons ( another of Resnais's enthusiasms ) in I Want to Go Home ( 1989 ), an ambitious theatrical adaptation followed with the diptych of Smoking / No Smoking ( 1993 ): Resnais, having admired the plays of Alan Ayckbourn for many years, chose to adapt what appeared the most intractable of them, Intimate Exchanges, a series of eight interlinked plays which follow the consequences of a casual choice to sixteen possible endings.

Gambon is a very private person, a " non-starry star " as Ayckbourn called him.

In addition to his many Shakespearean roles ( Jaques in As You Like It, Cassius in Julius Caesar, Polonius in Hamlet, Malvolio in Twelfth Night ), Hordern performed in plays by Strindberg, Chekhov, Ibsen, Pinero, Pinter, Dürrenmatt, Albee, Alan Ayckbourn, David Mercer and Tom Stoppard.

The Ayckbourn Theatre is a fully functional modern theatre.

Important modern playwrights include Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Alan Ayckbourn, John Osborne, Michael Frayn and Arnold Wesker.

A 1993 survey for ' Plays and Players ' magazine cited Godber as the third most performed playwright in the UK, after Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn. In 2005 won 2 BAFTAs for ' Odd Squad ', written and directed on location in Hull and screened by BBC children's television.