Show & Tell: Quotes by Alan Ayckbourn
"The next play - I’m just about to complete it actually. This is the one for next year actually and I’m looking back again at theatre and the need for make believe and the way weinvent stories. I’m interested in the borderline between dementia and theatre really, where someone suddenly starts to reinvent their own lives. We in theatre invent false lives of our own."
(Broadcasting House, BBC Radio 4, 30 April 2023)
“At this stage, I’m either in a reminiscent or a sci-fi mode. Last year I wrote a big AI play, Constant Companions, about androids interfering in people’s lives. So this year, I decided to write about what has been the love of my life: the theatre. I called on memories of the way my mentor, Stephen Joseph, sent companies careering around the country in lorries. But I also read about a company that did plays in people’s front rooms during lockdown, and I thought that was a nice idea. I also wanted to write a tragic love story about old age and dementia. But I hope that, without being cloying, the play is a celebration of the relation between actors and audience.”
(The Guardian, 5 August 2024)
"Dementia is a fear as I get older,” Ayckbourn admits. “That concern about forgetting names and repeating oneself, that sort of thing. My [artistic] interest in it lies in people
living increasingly in a self-created world and I wanted to juxtapose that with a theatre company trying to do the same thing in a conscious way. Jack imagines the audience, they’re imagining the characters. Both worlds meet in a Pirandello-esque way."
(Daily Telegraph, 30 August 2024)
"I was aware we were getting to number 90 in the list that Simon Murgatroyd, my archivist, keeps and I thought, what do I do? A love story or something. I thought, what has my life been about really? It has been a long love story with theatre. The company in the play is based on one formed in the last century with all the ideals of that time: a group of young actors wanting to spread the word of cutting- edge theatre - socially meaningful or big and entertaining - into working class homes - and front rooms. Most front rooms are tiny but in the play, an actor taking leaflets round stumbles upon a gold mine because the bloke who wants a front room play used to run the big store in town and still has plenty of cash. But there's something not right about him…"
(Scarborough Spy, September / October 2024)
“Show & Tell is about something which has preoccupied me for the last 60 years and probably more – theatre. It’s a love letter to theatre. The play is a dark farce that reflects that real life is curling around it all the time, with the structure of a play within a play: a play of the sort we would do in my second year with the Stephen Joseph Theatre Company at the Library Theatre, like A Game Of Love And Chance, a French farce. We had such a lark with that play, done as one of our attempts to attract a seaside audience.”
(charleshutchpress, 5 September 2024)
“What Stephen Joseph presented, and it comes into my play Show & Tell too, is that theatre is a meeting of audience and performers, and the audience are certainly not interested in who the director is - except with the cult of the director being so important now!”
(charleshutchpress, 5 September 2024)