'What is remarkable about Alan Ayckbourn's comedy is that it contrives to be simultaneously hilarious and harrowing. Literally, it is agonisingly funny' - "Daily Telegraph". In "Three Plays" Ayckbourn's perfectly pitched dialogue slices into the soul of suburbia. The settings are simple - a kitchen, a bedroom, a party - but the relationships between the husbands and wives are more complicated. Fraught relationships are exposed with humour, bathos and a sharp understanding of human nature.

Three Plays: Absurd Person Singular, Absent Friends, Bedroom Farce

AYCKBOURN, Alan

Literature & Fiction

Vintage Classics

Funny, gripping and wrenchingly truthful, these three blackly comic plays slice into the soul of suburbia. Couples – often mismatched, sometimes disorientated – dominate the action. The settings are simple – a kitchen, a bedroom, a party – all familiar terrains where husbands and wives meet, bewildered, puzzled and angry. ‘In the hilarious delineation of marital pain there is no one to touch Alan Ayckbourn’ Eric Shorter in the Daily Telegraph.

Three Plays: Bedroom Farce Absent Friends Absurd Person Singular

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Penguin Uk

The Crafty Art of Playmaking

In this seminal guide to playmaking, renowned playwright Alan Ayckbourn shares his tricks of the trade. From helpful hints on writing to tips on directing, this book provides a complete primer for the newcomer and a refresher for those with more experienc

St. Martin's: Griffin

How the other half loves: A comedy (Evans drama library)

Dramas & Plays

Evans Bros.

Conversations With Ayckbourn

Humanities Pr

his brilliant comic trilogy details the amorous exploits of Norman, assistant librarian, whose one aim is to make the women of his life happy-these women being, as it happens, three sisters, one of them his wife, who can't wear contact lenses because "life with Norman is full of unexpected eye movements." Each play stands uproariously on its own yet interlocks with the others to form an ingenious Chinese puzzle of successive relations. -- Barnes &amp; Noble

The Norman Conquests: A Trilogy of Plays (Black Cat Book)

Random House~trade

A student edition of five one-act plays by Britain's most popular playwright. 
 Ayckbourn's series of plays for 4-5 actors typify his black comedies of human behaviour. The plays are alternately naturalistic, stylised and farcical, but underlying each is the problem of loneliness. The Mother Figure shows a mother unable to escape from baby talk; in The Drinking Companion an absentee husband attempts seduction without success; in Between Mouthfuls, a waiter oversees a fraught dinner encounter. A garden party gets out of hand in Gosforth's Fete whilst A Talk in the Park is a revue style curtain call piece for the five actors. Whether the comedies concern marital conflict, infidelity or motherhood and take place on a park bench or at a village fete, the characters are familiar and their cries for help instantly recognisable. 
"Principally he is respected as a radical re-inventor of form" Dominic Dromgoole

CONFUSIONS

Heinemann

Confusions

METHUEN

The Heinemann Plays series offers contemporary drama and classic plays in durable classroom editions. Many have large casts and an equal mix of boy and girl parts. Confusions is a collection of five interlinked but self-contained plays dealing with human loneliness and hypocrisy.

Heinemann ed

A Chorus of Disapproval

Faber&Faber

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Books by AYCKBOURN, Alan