THE CRAFTY ART OF ALAN AYCKBOURN

“Could it be that Ayckbourn is ‘the Chekhov of our time,’ as Matthew Warchus, the director of the Old Vic revival of The Norman Conquests, has claimed? At the very least, I believe he is not a commercial playwright but a kind of poet, a craftsman of genius who never lets you forget for a moment that his often ludicrous characters, like Chekhov’s, are trapped in a world that has failed to live up to their expectations…”