NoneLikeScarboro

Big article on Alan Ayckbourn in the Daily Telegraph, centred on interview at his home in Scarborough - and with new play coming soon, A Trip to Scarborough.

Includes:

From the bow window of his drawing-room, more a belvedere of
curved glass, Sir Alan Ayckbourn can contemplate the North Sea.
It's the reason he moved his bed here, while convalescing after
his stroke last year. Well, not his bed - a hydraulic one on loan
from the hospital. The playwright adopts a comedy Yorkshire accent
as he recalls the words of the orderly who came to take the bed
away: 'I see you're standing then. Normally when I come to
collect these it's because the patient is dead.'

Although Ayckbourn's house - actually three Victorian terrace
houses knocked into one - overlooks Scarborough's South Bay, he
is not a Yorkshireman himself. Far from it. He was born in Hampstead
and went to school in Hertfordshire. But he clearly delights in
northern bluntness. Indeed, he tells me with an ambiguous grin about
the time a local taxi driver dropped him off at his theatre in
Scarborough and noticed a poster on the wall. It was for an Alan
Ayckbourn play and it was peppered with press quotations praising
the production. 'If you're that good,' the taxi
driver said, 'what are you doing here?'

The short answer is that Ayckbourn, who is now 68, first came to
Scarborough as an 18-year-old actor in 1957, liked it and stayed.
The longer answer is that Scarborough is where his mentor, the
theatrical pioneer Stephen Joseph, founded the theatre-in-the-round
that was to become Ayckbourn's spiritual home.

Ayckbourn is not only the most prolific playwright of his
generation but also the most widely produced. He is probably, in
fact, the most successful-in-own-lifetime playwright there has ever
been, including Shakespeare. And nearly all of the 70 plays he has
written have had their first performances at Scarborough's
Stephen Joseph Theatre. Many have ended up in the West End, too.
There and Broadway, where a street was briefly renamed Ayckbourn
Alley in his honour.
...

In his slightly apprehensive way, Ayckbourn has been trying to
imagine how his play set in Scarborough will go down with a local
audience. 'When you meet Yorkshiremen for the first time they
can seem quite rude,' he says, levering himself up from his
chair with the aid of a walking stick. 'If I meet them on their
way in to see one of my plays they will say: "Am I going to
enjoy this, then?"'

What do they say afterwards?

He grins the ambiguous grin. 'Usually they will say:
"Not bad".'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/11/25/sv_alanayckbourn.xml