Alan Ayckbourn is one of the more successful—and undervalued—British playwrights to have emerged in the postwar period. As a director, not only of his own work but of others’ (Arthur Miller described his production of A View from the Bridge as definitive), he has proved himself a sure-sighted man of the theatre. Paul Allen’s biography begins with his upbringing by his mother—his parents separated shortly after his birth—and takes us up to the triumphant performances of House and Garden, the two plays presented concurrently in real time with the same casts at the National Theatre in London in 2000.