Imatge de l'autor
135+ obres 1,951 Membres 14 Ressenyes 8 preferits

Sobre l'autor

Many American tourists who flock to the annual Ayckbourn offering in London's West End, think of Alan Ayckbourn as Great Britain's Neil Simon. The analogy holds true to the extent that the relationship between Ayckbourn's and Simon's plays illustrates the difference between British and American mostra'n més theater and audiences. Both writers capture the social machinations of middle-class characters in daily situations that are made compelling simply by the addition of clever but conventional plots, dramatic intrigues, twists, and discoveries. However, where Simon's plays tend to evolve into a condition of broad pathos or comedy, luxuriating in bittersweet melodrama, Ayckbourn's offerings revel in ever increasing intricacy, sharply incisive verbal dueling, and a dark social resonance that sounds much greater depths than in Simon's drama. Ayckbourn's scripts embody boggling challenges for directors and actors as well as audiences. Intimate Exchanges (1985), for example, a sequence of plays for ten characters played by only two actors, involves numerous moments when an actor chooses to send the script off on one of two alternative directions. The Norman Conquests (1975) typifies Ayckbourn's determination to squeeze as much as possible out of a dramatic construct. The trilogy's first play, Table Manners, offers a typical Ayckbourn scenario with family traumas played against each other in the constrained setting of a dining room. In the second and third plays, Living Together and Round and Round the Garden, the audience is exposed to simultaneous layers of action that occur in two other venues, the living room and garden, when characters are not onstage in the dining room. Each play makes sense on its own, but the trilogy taken as a whole embodies a vision of this family that is larger than the sum of the individual parts. Aychbourn has also been known for rather experimental staging. The Way Upstream (1982), for example, is set on and around a boat and requires flooding the stage. Ayckbourn's later plays reflect a bleak vision of society. In Woman in Mind (1985) and Henceforward (1987), Aychbourn's characters have become increasingly complex, and he reveals himself as an intense social commentator. Other recent plays include It Could Be Any One of Us (1983), Man of the Moment (1990), and Body Language (1991). Since the 1970s, Ayckbourn has written at least one play a season; the premieres are always at a small local theater that he runs in the resort town of Scarborough. 020 (Bowker Author Biography) Alan Ayckbourn is the author of more than fifty plays, many of which are available from Faber. He lives in England. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra'n menys
Crèdit de la imatge: Alan Ayckbourn Photo: Michael Winner

Sèrie

Obres de Alan Ayckbourn

The Crafty Art of Playmaking (2002) 108 exemplars
Woman in Mind: December Bee (1986) 80 exemplars
Confusions (1677) 75 exemplars
Communicating Doors (1995) 73 exemplars
Absurd Person Singular (1972) 71 exemplars
A Small Family Business (1987) 56 exemplars
Comic Potential: A Play (1999) 47 exemplars
Relatively Speaking (1968) 44 exemplars
Season's Greetings (1980) 41 exemplars
House & Garden: Two Plays (2000) 39 exemplars
A Chorus of Disapproval (1740) 36 exemplars
The Revengers' Comedies (1977) 33 exemplars
Joking Apart and Other Plays (1979) 31 exemplars
Henceforward (1988) 30 exemplars
Invisible Friends (1991) 24 exemplars
Taking Steps: a Farce (1644) 24 exemplars
Man of the Moment (1988) 21 exemplars
Absent Friends (Acting Edition) (1974) 21 exemplars
Things We Do For Love (1998) 20 exemplars
Time of my life (1993) 19 exemplars
Mr. A's Amazing Maze Plays (1989) 16 exemplars
Wildest Dreams (1993) 13 exemplars
Way Upstream (Acting Edition) (1983) 11 exemplars
Tons of money : a farce (1988) 11 exemplars
Joking Apart (1979) 10 exemplars
The Divide (2019) 10 exemplars
Boy Who Fell into a Book (2000) 7 exemplars
Improbable fiction : a comedy (2007) 7 exemplars
Snake in the Grass (2004) 7 exemplars
By Jeeves: Original 1996 London Cast Recording (1996) — Lyricist — 7 exemplars
Living Together (1975) 6 exemplars
Sweet Revenge [1998 movie] (1998) — Writer — 6 exemplars
Mixed Doubles (Acting Edition) (1970) 6 exemplars
By Jeeves 5 exemplars
Round and Round the Garden (1975) 5 exemplars
If I Were You (2011) 4 exemplars
Whenever (2002) 4 exemplars
Flatspin (2002) 4 exemplars
Callisto 5 : a play (1995) 4 exemplars
Family circles : a comedy (1997) 4 exemplars
A Word from Our Sponsor (1998) 4 exemplars
Roleplay (2002) 4 exemplars
A cut in the rates : a play (1991) 4 exemplars
The Champion of Paribanou (2000) 3 exemplars
The Jollies (2002) 3 exemplars
Orvin: Champion of Champions (2003) 3 exemplars
Casa i jardí (2005) 3 exemplars
Wolf at the door : a play (1993) 3 exemplars
Casa i jardí (2005) 3 exemplars
The Norman Conquests [1977 mini series] (2011) — Screenwriter — 3 exemplars
Body language : a play (2001) 3 exemplars
My Wonderful Day (2011) 2 exemplars
Drowning on Dry Land (2006) 2 exemplars
Alan Ayckbourn: Plays 4 (2011) 2 exemplars
Neighbourhood Watch (2013) 2 exemplars
The Alan Ayckbourn collection (2011) 2 exemplars
Sugar Daddies (2013) 2 exemplars
Stücke (1994) 2 exemplars
Private Fears in Public Places (2019) 2 exemplars
Gameplan (2004) 2 exemplars
Mr. Whatnot : a comedy (1992) 2 exemplars
Gizmo : a play (2000) 2 exemplars
My sister Sadie (2003) 2 exemplars
Absurd 1 exemplars
Making Tracks 1 exemplars
The Forest 1 exemplars
A Brief History of Women (2021) 1 exemplars
Master of his Art 1 exemplars
Herzen 1 exemplars
TAGS, Absurd Person Singular (2001) 1 exemplars
Surprises (2012) 1 exemplars
Interactions: A Collection (2012) 1 exemplars
Cheap & Cheerful 1 exemplars
A Talk in the Park 1 exemplars
Garden 1 exemplars
House (2003) 1 exemplars
Verwarringen 1 exemplars
Bedside story 1 exemplars
Liefde half om half 1 exemplars
Trap op, trap af 1 exemplars
Beste wensen 1 exemplars
Gosforth's Fete 1 exemplars
Between Mouthfuls 1 exemplars
Haunting Julia (2018) 1 exemplars
Mother Figure 1 exemplars
Drinking Companion 1 exemplars

Obres associades

Moving Parts: Monologues from Contemporary Plays (1992) — Col·laborador — 56 exemplars
Best Plays of the Seventies (1980) — Col·laborador — 11 exemplars
Who Was Betty?: A Whimsical Collection of Tall Stories (2011) — Col·laborador — 6 exemplars

Etiquetat

Coneixement comú

Data de naixement
1939-04-12
Gènere
male
Nacionalitat
UK
Lloc de naixement
London, England, UK
Llocs de residència
London, England, UK
Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, UK
Professions
stage manager
Premis i honors
Order of the British Empire (Commander)

Membres

Ressenyes

One of my very favorites.
 
Marcat
deliriumshelves | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Jan 14, 2024 |
A waste of time. The book is about grief and love, but it's so boring. I didn't care for the writing style. I'm assuming the translator took care to preserve the original Japanese style, though it's possible the translation is not very good.
 
Marcat
RachelRachelRachel | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Nov 21, 2023 |
Years ago a plague almost wiped out humanity and left all surviving females as carriers and all males as vulnerable to it. There had never been a cure - so the only way for the world to survive was to segregate the genders - women in the south, men in the north, no contact between them. Except for the pesky problem of pro-creation but artificial insemination takes care of that and when a boy is born, he is not vulnerable until puberty (or thereabouts) so a protocol had been created to ensure that boys are protected and move to the North when their time comes. Or so everyone believed. 50 years after the fall of the Divide, the novelist Soween Clay-Flin decides to tell the story of the fall of the Divide.

Using journal entries to tell a story has one big problem - the person whose diary is used is never there for everything. So instead of trying to work around that with author notes, the novel uses multiple sources - Soween's diary, her brother's Elihu's diary and the newspaper and council notes of the time. Elihu is one of the very few boys born into the all-female society - which allows both diaries to show the world from the eyes of both growing kids. The additional articles and extracts from official documentation and correspondence add the missing pieces in a story that leads to a place noone expects.

As women are the carriers and the plague kills any man in 10 days, the new order had convinced the women that they are responsible for the fall and enforces strict rules of behavior. And somehow the women at these times accepted it -- we never learn the full story of how the Divide came to be - we get the story as taught to the kids but even there, things don't always make sense. That separation of the genders also changes the idea of what is a normal relationship -- man/woman unions lead to death so they do not exist. Until Elihu falls in love that is.

It is obvious early in the novel that something is not right (and we know that the Divide is about to fall) - there are subtle clues here and there that the kids are not taught the whole story. Just how much of it they are not taught becomes clearer and clearer in time although the actual state of the world is revealed slowly and with a lot of red herrings along the way. And the end is heart breaking - even if the (in universe) foreword makes it clear that this is not a happy love story (if someone wants to read that as Romeo and Juliet in a post-apocalypses world, they won't be far off), the end hits hard. It is partially because all the earlier misdirection - Ayckbourn weaves a tale that makes you expect things to work out at the end. And they do - although not for everyone.

I am not sure what sounded scarier - the world as we saw it from the eyes of the two growing children or the world as we finally realized it to be later in the story. I would not want to live in either.

I liked this novel a lot more than I expected. The formatting (different fonts for each element) and the setup makes it look a bit weird but after reading it, I cannot imagine it being done any other way. If I have one issue with it, it is that I wish we had seen a lot more from the pre-history and from what exactly happened around the fall - the parts we saw were limited to what happened to our characters so it was never made clear how much of what everyone was taught was really the truth. Although the hints are there and maybe a summation is not really needed.
… (més)
½
3 vota
Marcat
AnnieMod | Jan 13, 2020 |
For Murakami fans, this will be a disappointment, of course. Plenty of heartbreak and whimsy, but not much for overall structure or continuity. I think the translation was a bit inelegant. Worth the day it took to read, though.
 
Marcat
Eoin | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Jun 3, 2019 |

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Obres
135
També de
3
Membres
1,951
Popularitat
#13,191
Valoració
3.8
Ressenyes
14
ISBN
226
Llengües
7
Preferit
8

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