I read confusions and I thought it was a brillaint book of plays. Ayckbourn cleverly writes and describes what is happening with the characters but also with the stage actions. So it creates a very visually affect and helps us understand what the charactors are feeling. My favourite play was "Talk in The Park" because the last words in the play 'talk to yourself' are a shrouded observation of how life treats most people, but Alan Ayckbourn manages to put laughter and interest into it.

This wonderfully witty collection of one-acts dates back to the 70s, but is still perfect for today's actors. Each interlocking play is set in rural England. Daffy characters abound; plots are Ayckbourn's typical maze of confusions. I have been in professional productions of two of these plays and they are real audience pleasers. Perfect material for directing and acting classes, as well as an evening with Alan Ayckbourn's peculiar universe of characters.

In the late 1970s PBS presented a hilarious trilogy of plays called "The Norman Conquests." I've been trying ever since to find them again. And here they are! This volume contains the scripts for all three of these amazing plays. Their premise: Norman is a real charmer who seduces (not necessarily sexually) everybody he meets. Each of the three plays takes place on a different stage. It's the same story and the same six characters, but seen from what happens only in each room in each play. It's an amazing accomplishment for a writer. This book carries an introduction by Ayckbourn that explains how he did it. And he says the plays are meant to be seen in any order. But I prefer the order given here: "Table Manners" (in the dining room), "Living Together" (the sitting room) and "Round and Round the Garden." If you haven't experienced it, the videos are available now (finally!), as well. The production (the same I saw on PBS) stars Tom Conti as an unforgettable Norman.

Terrific work (again!) from this major British playwright showing a disasterous family weekend where a would be Casanova sets his sights on his sister in law and the whole family ultimately become involved. Although written and set in the mid 1970s it remains just as funny (if not more so) now. All of the characters are classics and there are a feast of one liners. It really needs a stage production to be done justice though.

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Its about a woman named Susan whom while garden steps on a rake causing the end to him her in the head and knock her out. And from this point on we see her getting more and more dilusional and not even being able to distinguishing fantasy from reality or sometimes intermingling them. Susan no longer loves her husband, he's always to busy writing, they even sleep in seperate beds now. Their son hasn't talked to them(Or more so her)in years since he's been at some philisophical/religious institution. And also living in their house is her husband Gerald's sister "Muriel" whom Susan despises, Muriel is a terribly airheaded cook who believes her husband will come back from the dead for her.

So now we see through Susans eyes and meet her dilusionally perfect family: Her husband: Andy, Her brother: Tony, and her Daughter: Lucy. Each is truely kind and loving, but have harsh sides to them.

These dilusions were thus created as a need for love and emotions for Susan. She was feeling unsatisfied and she needed more then she had. Which at first she found in her fantasy family.

Another character who comes in at the beginning is Bill; the Doctor.

This shows the degeneration of modern families and to the extremes one may take to escape it and find the emotions that have once been forever lost in work. And the love and tenderness that has desinigrated and the fantasies created in longing for these things.

This is a *GREAT* read, I definetely RECOMEND IT!!!

*Enjoy*!

God Bless ~Amy

Woman in Mind is very remarkable for its representation and misrepresentation of reality. In the play, Susan, a totally disoriented woman, finds herself entagled in a viscious web of existence devoured by reality and virtuality. The real world she perceives is composed of her husband, Gerald, a boring clergyman, her boring and inefficient sister in Law, Muriel, and her irresponsive, introvert son, Rick, along side with Dr Bill Windsor who is a substitute doctor for the towns original medic. The virtual world on the other hand is composed of similar presence: Andy, a much more colorful and lively husband than the real one, Tony, an easy going, flamboyant brother, and Lucy , a charming and sweet daughter, along side with Bill Windsor, the family's substitute doctor. Thus Woman in Mind is presented on stage as well as on page ýn two frames or settýngs juxtaposed sýde by side and sometimes superimposed on each other: the real and the virtual. In both of the frames there is the conventional, traditional family pattern. However, the only difference between the two patterns is that the real is much less colorful than the virtual. The first sordid family represents Susan's real world. A dull world inhabited by dull people. In order to escape this grisly world she creates a colorful family in her mind and begins to communicate and live with them. Her virtual husband, brother and daughter, unlike her real ones, care a lot about her, eager to please her and very sensitive to her needs emotionally and physically. So far so good. But then suddenly her virtual world, like her real one, begins to collapse. The loving simulacra she creates begin to ignore her commands, violate her privacy and take control over her real life. When she tries to resist them by trying to switch them off, she fails and her system crashes. This crash is manifested in the last scene when she no longer is able to distinguish between the real and the virtual,and all the world appears to her as a mutated virtuality.

The most dangerous question the play poses is why Susan's virtual world collapses. A very simplistic answer is because reality comes first, and any rejection of reality is bound to backfire and lead to such conclusion. A very main stream understanding of a middle class British morality text. But is this all? No. Somewhere in the play itself Andy warns ,or may be significantly, points out to Susan that "nothing is what it is" Indeed, the significations of the events may not look as what they appear to be.

In the text, Susan in order to escape her reality of family life and marriage entrapment, resorts to fantasy. In reality, as we are made to understand, she is mainly depressed because basically her sexual and emotional needs are not well met by her clergy husband and introvert son. So to compensate, she resolts to substitution. She creates a virtual verile, slightly younger than her husband and a doting daughter. This fantasy works for a short time and crashes badly.

Her virtual reality fails because, in my opinion, she fails to exit out side the conventional matrix of every day existence. All she does to evade her conventional real life setting is to replace it with other conventional imaginary setting. The big catch that none of the play's critics and reviewers sees, lurks in this particular happening. Namely, the collapse of the unreal because it is structured exactly like the real.

Reality is a fabrication of the mind, and if the mind fabricates another reality based on a previous reality that already is a fabrication, then the second fabrication, twice removed from the mind that fabricates, is usually less durable and less credible than the original. This is Platonic in essence. And when the mind starts living to the faint and indurable reality any thing may happen to it.I am not trying here to say that if the woman has devised a different, non-mainstream pattern of fantasy, such as lesbian, fetishest, she would have been much better off. We will never know. The text has been created, and what is done is done; not even the god-author can undo it.

What remains to say is that Suzan's unreal wold's collapse is the author'sdeath sentence on conventional middle class family structure. The author passes this sentence twice in the course of the text. First, Suzan's real, worldy family is a flop. The term "family" is used because the English language lacks the expression to describe the lack of it. Second, Suzan's unreal family, inspite of its initial cheerful and optimistic appearance, turns to be a worse choice than the real, as it sucks and drains Susan's life force.

This is hard play to describe. I'd call it something like a funny, heart-warming thriller. "Communicating Doors" is the story of a prostitute named Phoebe who is given the chance to save her own life and the lives of two other women when, fleeing a murderer through a communicating door, she finds herself unexpectedly twenty years in the past. This play made me feel a full range of emotions in three hours when I saw it in the theater, and reading it was almost as good. Ruella and Phoebe, the two main characters, are two of the most likable and complex people I've encountered recently in literature. It kept me laughing, and in suspense, right up through the final scene. I rarely give out five stars, but this play deserves it.

As much as the plays "House" and "Garden" lack in moral lessons or even strong plot, they more than make up in idea. Written to be performed at the same time in adjoining theatres, House and Garden give viewers a great two evenings out. This is a excellent community or educational theatre project!

Mothers and wives fighting? Sounds oddly familiar. The problems in this household are comedic yet amazingly real. Feels like home to me!

I admire Ayckbourns' work and this reminded me of one of his best plays; "Communicating Doors". It's funny, sad and hopeful and I'd love to see it performed. The man is a true genius and thankfully he's prolific as well!

"Comic Potential," by Alan Ayckbourn, represents a species of literature that I don't believe I have ever before encountered: a science fiction comedy for the stage. The opening pages note that the play was first performed at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough in 1998, and was then presented in London in 1999. A brief author bio notes that the London-born Ayckbourn has had a distinguished career in the British theater.

The book version's back cover notes that this play takes place "in the forseeable future." In this future world human actors have apparently been replaced by acting robots known as "actoids," which are programmed by technical specialists. Early in the play a young writer named Alan meets an actoid in whom he sees a potential for comedy. Alan's plans, and his relationship with his robotic protegee, drive the plot forward and complicate the lives of many characters.

This is a funny and thought-provoking play that combines comedy and mild suspense. Ayckbourn offers a fascinating glimpse at a culture which, because of the presence of human-like robots, has evolved its own set of new social protocols and prejudices. Clever dialogue and well-written characters further add to the impact of this entertaining, and surprisingly moving, text.

Real life situations, classic characters, and a futuristic twist make readers as well as audiences wonder what the future will bring. This has got to be my favorite Ayckbourn play yet. It is also a great acting tool because you see the play through the eyes of the playwright. However, it may not be appropriate for young readers do to adult language and situations.

A definition of farce may include 'a manipulation of space in time' - that is, it depends on a precise patterning of characters' movements through a circumscribed space (rooms, entrances, exits etc.), mechanically timed. You could say this about all theatre, but the peculiar thrill of farce arises from its mechanics, the choreography of this spatial and temporal movement.

Ayckbourn's masterly farce 'How the other half loves' (1970)manipulates time in space. It centres on three middle-class couples of varying affluence: the Fosters, boss Frank and his glamorous wife Fiona; the young, impoverished Phillipses, Bob, Frank's bored employee and Teresa, sexually frustrated and limited to looking after the baby; and the Featherstones, William and Mary, an eccentric, socially inept couple, considered pathologically dull by everyone else.

Fiona and Bob are having an affair; to appease their suspicious spouses, they pretend to have been comforting one of the fictionally cuckolded Featherstones, whom they barely know. the Featherstones are invited to dinner parties by the other couples, and the usual farcical goings-on proliferate, mistaken identities and assumptions, misinterpreted motives, frustration leading hysteria and violence, lies leading to ever more extravagant lies, etc.

So far, so normal. Ayckbourn's innovation is to place the distinct spaces of the Fosters' and Phillips' homes on the same stage, like consecutive slices of cake, producing the jarring spectacle of characters living miles apart moving in the same room. This results in the astonishing achievement of Act 2, where two dinner parties on separate nights are played in the same time and space, the supposedly dull Featerstones manoeuvring backwards and forwards through time to uproarious, and possibly Borgesian, effect.

What marks this achievement as special is that Ayckbourn still manages to produce a tear-streamingly entertaining farce of traditional pleasures. The structure also has a thematic effect, connecting characters and putting them in collision, while dramatising the arbitrariness and breakdown of marriage, and, by extension, the kind of society bolstered by it. This is very much a play of the 1970s, where the permissiveness and experimentation of the 60s finally impinged on the 'respectable' middle classes, with destabilising results.

Though not quite a match for Shakespeare, Aykborn's "things" is a funny play, which brings us the moral dilema of love and faith, of love and friendship. The charachters are a bit pale, and lack a real personality, but- Hey, we can't have it all!!!

In our opinion " Absurd person singular " is worth four stars. The relationships of the three couples are presented in a very funny way. The main characters are exaggerated very much. That's why the comedy is funny as well as critical. There is Marion for example who behaves in avery theatrical way, and Jane who is obsessed with cleaning. The reader is disillusioned about marriages and friendships because he realizes that marriages and even friendships aren't always as positive and easy as they first appear to be. Eva's saying:" My existence ended the day he married me " shows this fact in a very clear way. Another aspect is that the reader doesn't really identify with those characters because only types are presented which makes us see the characters critically.