#ayckbourn

Been shooting a trailer for TTC's production of Alan Ayckbourn's PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES coming to @trinitytheatretw at the end of April! #theatre #play #show #trailer #filming #alanayckbourn #ayckbourn #privatefearsinpublicplaces

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Those of you who know me, know that I have a passion for the plays of Alan Ayckbourn, so today I'm doubly thrilled to mark the Broadway openings of “How the Other Half Loves” on this date in 1971 and “Bedroom Farce” today in 1979. “How the Other Half Loves” had its world premiere in Scarborough, England, in 1969, and in London's West End a year later. The ingenious play shows us two living spaces – one for the Foster family and the other for the Phillips'. But instead of being set side by side, the sets are overlapping, with half a couch in one home and the other half in the other. The coup de theatre is when both couples host a dinner party for a business associate on successive nights. Like the set, instead of the scenes taking place in chronological order, they are both played simultaneously, with the couples alternating from one party to another at the same dinner table. For its West End premiere, producer Michael Codron thought a star was needed to anchor the show so Robert Morley was hired. Ayckbourn had written the show for a company and felt Morley's 'larger than life' presence unbalanced the play. It would be Ayckbourn's Broadway premiere, and so a star was recruited here as well: Phil Silvers. Ayckbourn was convinced by director Gene Saks to 'Americanize' the play. "We changed the names of towns, inverted dialogue... that sort of thing. Americans seem to put their verbs in different order, don't you think? In swapping lines, I was getting more and more Americanized and Gene was getting more and more British. One of the biggest dangers playwrights undergo crossing the Atlantic is assuming we have a similar language. In a way we don't. That's why we've written this show almost as a translation." The play also starred Tom Aldredge, Sandy Dennis and Richard Mulligan. It ran 104 performances at the Royale Theatre. “Bedroom Farce” would prove quite a different experience for Ayckbourn. This production was basically the one that opened at London's National Theatre in 1977. The play is set in three bedrooms set side by side, and concerns the antics of four couples on the night of a party. In planning the play, Ayckbourn said “It'll have everything about bedrooms but copulation, something which I believe is hardly practiced in the British bedroom anyway." Contrary to its title, Ayckbourn insists this is not a true farce, but rather a comedy of manners set in bedrooms. The cast were imported from Britain and featured Michael Gough. After the British cast returned home, American actors took over and extended the run to 276 performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. The new group featured John Lithgow, Judith Ivey, and Mildred Natwick. As in the UK, Ayckbourn and National director Peter Hall shared directing credit, the first time Ayckbourn had staged his own work in Scarborough, London and New York. For that effort he received Tony Awards for direction and the play as a whole. Both “How The Other Half Loves” and “Bedroom Farce” have been revived in the West End, but not on Broadway. However, off-Broadway and regional productions are quite common.

GAH.

That smile, again. Norman Conquests, in the 70s.