Comic potential - Softcover

'As with all Ayckbourn's best plays you are watching a comedy-farce and suddenly find that tragedy comes out of the woodwork and grins at you...Like all serious comedies, "Comic Potential "hurts you with the sheer exuberance of its laughter and liberates you with its seriousness...The master of Scarborough is still on top form."--"Sunday Times"
"He is a profoundly moral writer and . . . has reached a new synthesis between the comic and the serious-the painfully funny . . . We are a fortunate age to have had our own Moliere."--Sir Peter Hall
He is a profoundly moral writer and . . . has reached a new synthesis between the comic and the serious-the painfully funny . . . We are a fortunate age to have had our own Moliere.--Sir Peter Hall"

As with all Ayckbourn's best plays you are watching a comedy-farce and suddenly find that tragedy comes out of the woodwork and grins at you...Like all serious comedies, "Comic Potential "hurts you with the sheer exuberance of its laughter and liberates you with its seriousness...The master of Scarborough is still on top form. "Sunday Times"

He is a profoundly moral writer and . . . has reached a new synthesis between the comic and the serious-the painfully funny . . . We are a fortunate age to have had our own Moliere. Sir Peter Hall"

As with all Ayckbourn's best plays you are watching a comedy-farce and suddenly find that tragedy comes out of the woodwork and grins at you...Like all serious comedies, Comic Potential hurts you with the sheer exuberance of its laughter and liberates you with its seriousness...The master of Scarborough is still on top form. Sunday Times

He is a profoundly moral writer and . . . has reached a new synthesis between the comic and the serious-the painfully funny . . . We are a fortunate age to have had our own Moliere. Sir Peter Hall

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"As with all Ayckbourn's best plays you are watching a comedy-farce and suddenly find that tragedy comes out of the woodwork and grins at you...Like all serious comedies, Comic Potential hurts you with the sheer exuberance of its laughter and liberates you with its seriousness...The master of Scarborough is still on top form." --Sunday Times

"He is a profoundly moral writer and . . . has reached a new synthesis between the comic and the serious-the painfully funny . . . We are a fortunate age to have had our own Moliere." --Sir Peter Hall

Alan Ayckbourn was born in London in 1939 to a violinist father and a mother who was a writer. He left school at seventeen with two 'A' levels and went straight into the theatre. Two years in regional theatre as an actor and stage manager led in 1959 to the writing of his first play, The Square Cat, for Scarborough's Theatre in the Round at the instigation of his then employer and subsequent mentor, Stephen Joseph. Some 75 plays later, his work has been translated into over 35 languages, is performed on stage and television throughout the world and has won countless awards. There have been English and French screen adaptations, the most notable being Alain Resnais' fine film of Private Fears in Public Places. Major successes include Relatively Speaking, How the Other Half Loves, Absurd Person Singular, Bedroom Farce, A Chorus of Disapproval, The Norman Conquests, A Small Family Business, Henceforward . . ., Comic Potential, Things We Do For Love, and Life of Riley. Surprises was first presented at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, and subsequently at the the Minerva Theatre, Chichester in 2012. In 2009, he retired as Artistic Director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, where almost all his plays have been and continue to be first staged, after 37 years in the post. Knighted in 1997 for services to the theatre, he received the 2010 Critics' Circle Award for Services to the Arts and became the first British playwright to receive both Olivier and Tony Special Lifetime Achievement Awards.