SOURCE: “The Serious Side of Alan Ayckbourn,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, March, 1983, pp. 36-46.

In the following excerpt, Page discusses how Ayckbourn's work deals with the many serious aspects of being human.

The comedies of Alan Ayckbourn have featured prominently in the British theatre in the last fifteen years. His earliest plays were the lightest and purest of comedies, giving him the reputation of being the most undemanding of entertainers. This initial reputation has obscured the depth and the seriousness of some of his plays, particularly those of 1974-78: Absent Friends, Just Between Ourselves, and Joking Apart.

Ayckbourn's first big success, Relatively Speaking, staged in London in 1967,¹ led John Russell Taylor to judge that Ayckbourn “avoided any suggestion of deeper meaning,” that one would not classify him as “important,” and that he “looks certain to remain, at best, one of our most reliable light entertainers. …”² In...