Alan Ayckbourn is the most performed of contemporary British dramatists; his plays are a staple of repertory theaters, frequently translated, and usually highly successful. Their very success--and the fact that, although he is endlessly technically innovative, he works with the core ingredients of farce and light comedy--have contributed to a certain amount of critical suspicion of his work. Like Trevor R. Griffiths, however, he has preferred to operate along broadly traditional lines, while at the same time stretching the notion of what makes a play suitable for the theater. The subject matter of the plays is largely domestic and even parochial, as Ayckbourn returns again and again to the nuances of the class system and the often phatic rituals by which people define their social existence, shoring themselves up against their own ineffectiveness and their sense of a void beneath the social surface.

Alan Ayckbourn was born in...