ALAN AYCKBOURN’S LEGERDEMAIN.
ALAN AYCKBOURN’S LEGERDEMAIN. The 16 interrelated plays I described yesterday are the kinds of plays that Ayckbourn writes. This is a man who once created two interrelated plays that ran simultaneously in adjacent theaters. The actors would make an exit in one play and rush over to the other theater to make an entrance in the other play. Ayckbourn’s THE NORMAN CONQUESTS consisted of three interrelated plays (not performed simultaneously). Each exit in one play was an entrance in one of the other two plays. The 16 play set (INTIMATE EXCHANGES) that I am visiting now arose because he had been left with only two actors in the theater he runs in Scarborough, England. He said he had always wanted to write what he called a “two-hander.” Being Ayckbourn, what he wrote requires the two actors to carry about thirty scenes and about twenty hours of dialogue in their heads.