A Chorus of Disapproval
Plunges us into an amateur operatic society production of The Beggar's Opera. The result is a magnificent comedy--symmetrically shaped, psychologically acute and painfully, heartbreakingly funny. -- Guardian
A Small Family Business
A sizzling comedy from a playwright who possesses an unnerving and unflinching insight into the ways of the suburban world. -- Time Out
Henceforward...
That resourceful state magician, Alan Ayckbourn, has produced another dazzling display of theatrical alchemy. It is impossible to think of any other British dramatist who could write a science fiction play, complete with robots, high-tech gadgets and banks of winking electronic equipment and transform it into a superbly constructed comedy that also encompasses moments of desperate human sadness. -- Daily Telegraph
Man of the Moment
This is Ayckbourn at the peak of his powers using comedy to say harsh, true things about our society. With the cleansing force of a satirist, he suggests we are constantly fed a doctored version of reality in which virtue is treated as disposable and even as sexy. What he has written is a tonic comedy that defends traditional values without a trace of moral sententiousness. -- Guardian

A Chorus of Disapproval
Plunges us into an amateur operatic society production of The Beggar's Opera, The result is a magnificent comedy--symmetrically shaped, psychologically acute and painfully, heartbreakingly funny. -- Guardian
A Small Family Business
A sizzling comedy from a playwright who possesses an unnerving and unflinching insight into the ways of the suburban world. -- Time Out
Henceforward...
That resourceful state magician, Alan Ayckbourn, has produced another dazzling display of theatrical alchemy. It is impossible to think of any other British dramatist who could write a science fiction play, complete with robots, high-tech gadgets and banks of winking electronic equipment and transform it into a superbly constructed comedy that also encompasses moments of desperate human sadness. -- Daily Telegraph
Man of the Moment
This is Ayckbourn at the peak of his powers using comedy to say harsh, true things about our society. With the cleansing force of a satirist, he suggests we are constantly fed a doctored version of reality in which virtue is treated as disposable and even as sexy. What he has written is a tonic comedy that defends traditional values without a trace of moral sententiousness. -- Guardian

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.