In Anger and After (1962), John Russell Taylor describes Alan Ayckbourn as ‘a twenty three year old actor… whose play Standing Room Only showed more than promise, if less than complete achievement'. It might seem surprising that Alan Ayckbourn should be included in a survey of British play writing from 1956 to 1962, the period when English theatre discovered the kitchen sink and reinvigorated itself. In fact, this was his fourth professionally produced play, and was to be shortly followed by two others mounted in London's West End. Russell Taylor's influential book was a much admired critical survey but, even in its second edition in 1969, the judgement on Ayckbourn was unchanged - ‘a less than complete achievement - the same might be said of his later West End comedy success Relatively Speaking'.

Ayckbourn is rarely linked with the generation of playwrights that included Osborne, Wesker, Arden, Pinter and Delaney. But he started writing in 1959 at the time when the new wave of writers was just emerging and, indeed, many of them shared Margaret Ramsey as literary agent. Ayckbourn was alarmed at a party to see several of his fellow young literary bloods wearing badges saying ‘I am not Alan Ayckbourn'. Clearly this young playwright was already deemed an outsider and for much of his career he suffered from a critical prejudice that it took many plays written over many years to shake.

It is easy to see why he was dismissed so early on. The cultural revolution that followed Look Back in Anger pursued its own theatrical orthodoxy. The old theatre establishment - its playwrights and actors, its subject matter and audience, its commercial and management structure - was viewed with great suspicion. Alan Ayckbourn did not fit easily into the new order. Neither he nor his characters had an overtly political agenda. His plays were not set in a working-class environment; indeed, they clearly described middle-class settings and preoccupations. Most suspicious of all, he apparently aspired to writing ‘well made’ plays and was promising to have great commercial potential. Resolutely sticking to comedy as his chosen genre, he quickly found star actors and managements eager to snap up his plays. It seems all too obvious that, in the cultural climate of the 1960s, he would be labelled as the inheritor of the lightweight boulevardier mantle recently worn by Terence Rattigan, Peter Ustinov and Enid Bagnold.