By Season's Greetings (1980), Alan Ayckbourn had a proven track record of West End success and an international reputation as a comic playwright. This and the plays that followed show a total command of technical and comedic resources. This chapter will survey some of them to analyse and demonstrate his craftsmanship.

Ayckbourn was by now regarded as capable of making a popular audience laugh whilst exploring his subjects with a kindly objectivity that could cast a dark shadow over the laughter. He was frequently compared to Neil Simon, the equally successful American comic dramatist. But it has often been pointed out that, though they are both theatrical craftsmen of great skill, they work in quite different ways.

Simon is the master of the one-liner joke; Ayckbourn tries to edit out such jokes. Laughter in the English writer's plays comes from what characters do because of who they are and because they are at the mercy of each other, and of circumstance. They cannot construct careful barbed verbal responses for selfprotection as Neil Simon's characters can. Simon's background is as a scriptwriter primarily focused on words; Ayckbourn's is as a director, and he relishes working with visual action and actors.

Alan Ayckbourn has always insisted that he is as much a theatre director as he is a playwright. He has been artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough since 1970, with responsibility for directing the majority of plays mounted in any one season and for writing at least one play a year which will keep the organization solvent. It is this dual role that informs his plays and strengthens them technically. It has given him the opportunity to experiment to a quite remarkable degree. The plays written for the company question the Aristotelian unities of time and place with a mounting disregard for precedent. They become increasingly fluid in both location and time, shifting within both, and challenging the authority of the playwright to dictate narrative structure.

Ayckbourn is given less than due credit for these experiments for two reasons: subject matter and milieu remain largely within a particular set of parameters, and they are underpinned by a secure dramatic technique which arises out of his directing experience and consequently never undermines the actor.