Alan Ayckbourn, one of Britain's most prolific playwrights, is assuredly its most successful in terms of financial return. His plays, translated into twenty-six languages, earn him more than £100,000 a year; and hardly a year goes by without at least two of his works running concurrently in London with another in preparation at a small theater in Scarborough, the middle-class Yorkshire coastal resort where he has lived and worked for nearly all of his professional life. Yet Ayckbourn is a playwright in a quandary. His early works, delightful if occasionally mindless farces buoyed by his ability to explore the limits of staging, won him a devoted audience yet aroused the apprehensions of some critics who considered him little more than a facile trickster. Ayckbourn's own statement about his work, in fact, encouraged this critical view: "I'm far too fond of the theatre to take it too seriously."

Nonetheless, more...