Alan Ayckbourn: Actor
Actor: Related Pages
Alan Ayckbourn's Roles
1955○ Romeo & Juliet
1956
○ Macbeth
○ The Strong Are Lonely
○ The Corn Is Green
○ It's A Wise Child
1957
○ South Sea Bubble
○ She Stoops To Conquer
○ Flare Path
○ The Happiest Days Of Your Life
○ The Rainmaker
○ An Inspector Calls
○ The Ornamental Hermit
○ Under Milk Wood
○ Life With Father
○ Mademoiselle Jaire
1958
○ Darling
○ Henry IV
○ Cards Of Identity
○ Captain Carvallo
○ Dial M For Murder
○ Love And Chance
○ Man With A Flower In His Mouth
○ Martine
○ Ring Of Roses
○ Squaring The Circle
1959
○ The Birthday Party
○ Bell, Book And Candle
○ Easter
○ Frankenstein
○ The Square Cat
1960
○ Then...
○ The Sacrifice of Isaac
○ The Way of the Cross
○ Viennese Interlude
○ 'Prentice Pillar
○ Wuthering Heights
○ Love After All
○ The Ark
○ Soldier From The Wars Returning
○ Five Finger Exercise
○ Dad's Tale
1961
○ Victoria Regina
○ Five Finger Exercise
○ Soldier From The Wars Returning
○ Little Brother, Little Sister
○ Standing Room Only
○ Stranger In The Family
○ The Bed Life Of A Mad Boy
○ The Boys And The Girls
○ Love Undertaken
1962
○ Follow The Lover
○ A Doll's House
○ Hamlet
○ O'Flaherty V.C.
○ Usher
○ The Birds And The Well-Wishers
○ The Rainmaker
○ Death At The New Year
○ The Birds And The Well-Wishers
○ O'Flaherty V.C.
○ The Caretaker
○ Usher
○ The Rainmaker
○ Christmas V Mastermind
1963
○ The Rehearsal
○ Waiting For Godot
○ An Awkward Number
○ A Man For All Seasons
○ The Rainbow Machine
○ Miss Julie
○ The Caretaker
○ Two For The Seesaw
○ The Dumb Waiter
○ The Collection
○ Ted's Cathedral
○ Gaslight
○ The Prisoner
1964
○ The Jew Of Malta
○ The Doctor And The Devils
○ Two For The Seesaw
○ Much Ado About Nothing
2020
○ Anno Domino
○ Haunting Julia
2023
○ Truth Will Out
He began his first job immediately after leaving Haileybury, joining the renowned actor-manager Donald Wolfit's company in a production of The Strong Are Lonely at the Edinburgh Festival. The production needed someone who could play a sentry and stand at attention for upwards of an hour and Edgar Matthews had promised this was not a problem as Alan had been part of the Cadet Force at Haileybury. Alan was employed as an assistant stage manager with a cameo acting appearance as a sentry and spent three weeks with the company at the festival before returning home.
At which point, the second contact Edgar Matthews had given Alan came into play. Melville Gilham at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing, employed Alan for six months as a student Assistant Stage Manager. Alan was able to work in and experience a variety of different departments in the theatre, which included some valuable acting experience with a couple of small roles. It was common at the time for ASMs to get small walk-on parts in plays and they were frequently utilised as under-studies.
After six months, Alan's funds ran out and with a good grounding in theatre, he looked for professional employment. This came at the Leatherhead Theatre Club where Alan was employed by Hazel Vincent Wallace as an actor and stage manager. Whilst working there he met Rodney Wood, another stage manager, who took him to London to see Studio Theatre Ltd performing in-the-round at the Mahatma Gandhi Hall. It was a fortuitous turn of events which would have huge repercussions for Alan as Wood had been asked to join the company in Scarborough for the summer and he asked Alan to join him as an Acting Stage Manager with the promise of more acting roles.
Impressed by what he had seen, Alan agreed to join Studio Theatre Ltd at the Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre, Scarborough, for its 1957 summer season. There he met Stephen Joseph, the man who would become a mentor and the most influential figure in the young man's career and life. Alan stage-managed for the summer season as well as acting in two plays, before taking a job at the Oxford Playhouse for the winter months having been offered work there by Milos Volanakis. Alan spent most of the winter performing and Volanakis hoped he would stay with the company for its summer season. However, Stephen Joseph had contacted Alan asking him to return to Scarborough for the 1958 summer season. Alan decided to return to the coastal resort, where he stayed until 1962.
Between 1958 and 1962, Alan was employed primarily as an actor and became increasingly prominent within the company. This coincided with Stephen Joseph commissioning Alan to write his first play in 1959 (after Alan had complained about the quality of the roles he was playing) and his first steps into directing in 1961. His playwriting and directing would increasingly begin to dominate his theatrical career.
However, it cannot be over-emphasised that Alan's initial forays into writing were largely as a showcase for his own acting abilities.His first professionally commissioned play, The Square Cat, featured a lead role - which he played - which required singing, dancing and guitar-playing (none of which Alan could do well) as well as a character with two entirely different personas.
In 1962, Stephen Joseph founded the UK's first permanent theatre-in-the-round venue at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent (Scarborough had been home to the country's first theatre-in-the-round company as the Library Theatre was a seasonal venture). Alan, along with many of the 1962 Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre acting company, decided to go with Stephen to Stoke-on-Trent and became a founding member of the Victoria Theatre where he worked as an actor, director and writer until 1964. At which point, he left the Victoria Theatre to concentrate on his playwriting career as a consequence of his play Mr Whatnot being optioned for a West End production. Having given up acting and left the Victoria Theatre, Mr Whatnot promptly proceeded to be a disastrous flop leading Alan to join the BBC as a radio drama producer in 1965.
Alan's final professional stage-acting role was Jerry in William Gibson's Two For The Seesaw. Having left the Victoria Theatre in early 1964 and just prior to working for the BBC, Alan - and his future wife Heather Stoney - were contacted by Spotlight in a search for actors familiar with William Gibson’s play. A production was being staged at the Civic Theatre, Rotherham, and there had been problems with the original two actors. Heather and Alan were both employed having previously performed the play at the Victoria Theatre in 1963. Alan's experience with this week-long production was quite negative, largely due to the inexperience of the stage manager - who happened to be Bill Kenwright, the same man who would go on to become one of the UK's most successful theatre producers. To all intents and purposes, this was the end of Alan Ayckbourn's acting career and at the time he finished, he was probably one of the most experienced in-the-round actors in the UK and had performed in more than 70 different professional plays in nine years.
There was one further unexpected stage role though in 1969, when an unfortunate accident during the world premiere run of his play How The Other Half Loves led Alan to take to the stage once more....
"Jeremy [Franklin] went to Kirkbymoorside for the day and tripped on the pavement. Bob Peck wasn't available to take over [the role of Frank] as he was on the beach, so I did it, and it was my very last time on the stage. I did it for five nights and Jeremy was quite reluctant to come back as I was quite into it. I had to take the script on stage on the first night and I was so enjoying it and was so confident by the last scene that I found the last couple of pages had fallen out of the book. There was I, ready for the triumphant finale with my wife... I looked at her [Elizabeth Sladen], she looked at me, and so I began to ad-lib and she began to try to ad-lib, so it was an actor's nightmare. She was thinking, 'Not only is he the director and writer, now he's ad-libbing and I have to ad-lib with him.' I knew we had to finish it! Afterwards we then tried to write the lines down and from the improvised ending came what is now the proper ending... though Robert Morley may have added another."
Alan Ayckbourn
During 2020, Alan made an unexpected return to his acting roots as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic which swept the world and closed all the UK's theatre. As a result of these extraordinary circumstances, he found himself returning to acting and playing all the male voices for the world premiere - as an audio-stream - of his 84th play, Anno Domino. The play was recorded at his home - with his wife, Heather Stoney, playing all the female roles - before being released online by the Stephen Joseph Theatre for an exclusive period. Later that year, he would also produce a recording of his 1994 play Haunting Julia performing all the male roles which was also streamed any the SJT over Christmas.
As of writing, Alan's final step onto the boards was in 2023 when he participated in a rehearsed reading of his previously unseen play, Truth Will Out. During the exclusive read-through, he played the small role of Jim Tungsten alongside his hand-picked company.
Article by Simon Murgatroyd. Copyright: Haydonning Ltd. Please do not reproduce without permission of the copyright holder.
The Actor section of www.alanayckbourn.net is indebted to The Michael T Mooney Archive for material relating to Alan Ayckbourn's acting career at the Oxford Playhouse and the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent.