The Archive of Sir Alan Ayckbourn

Sir Alan Ayckbourn is an outstanding figure in post-1945 British and world theatre. He has written seventy-four full-length plays, and his work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and he is renowned as a gifted director of his own work and that of others. His many directorial successes range from Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge to Shakespeare’s Othello. The archive covers all aspects of his career, as playwright, director, and artistic director (in the UK and abroad), and as a major figurein the British theatre over the last four decades. It includes working drafts, holograph manuscripts and revised typescripts of his plays, including his plays for children and other writings. Written first in pencil or pen they reveal Sir Alan at work, creating dialogue and text and working out the complex details of how a play is to be staged and performed. There are notes on plots, diagrams of relationships between characters, sketches of stage settings and movement. The extensive correspondence with playwrights, actors, directors, producers, designers and agents, is almost a Who’s Who of theatre from the second half of the twentieth century onwards: Peter Hall, Peggy Ramsay, Trevor Nunn, Michael Winner, Stephen Sondheim, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Alan Plater, Martin Jarvis and many other household names.