Alan Ayckbourn: Early Plays
Prior to his first professional commission, Alan Ayckbourn recalls he wrote approximately a dozen one act plays between his first professional acting job in 1956, aged 17, and the premiere of The Square Cat in 1959. Very little is known about any of these plays and only a handful of them are still in existence.The Season
The Season is the earliest complete example of Alan Ayckbourn’s playwriting career known to still exist and was written no later than 1958.It is described as “a drama in four scenes” and features two characters, The Girl and The Traveller. The only surviving script does not carry the name of the author, which strongly indicates this was one of Alan’s early plays written before he received his first professional commission with The Square Cat and started using the pseudonym Roland Allen.
“I'd been writing before that [The Square Cat], but they'd never had the test of production, and most of them, with a couple of exceptions which had been rather morose pieces, had been comic in tone.”
The Season falls into the morose rather than comic category; each scene is set in a different season beginning with spring and ending with winter with each season moving forward in time from medieval times to Edwardian England to a post-apocalyptic future. The play follows the relationship that develops between The Girl and The Traveller with the story continuing through each different time period.
During the first act, the couple meet and during the second, they are together but leave each other in anger. The third scene, apparently 18 years on, sees The Traveller now meeting The Woman for the first time since he left her. She is close to death and the scene apparently ends with a nuclear explosion. The final scene is set in a winter some years after the attack when The Traveller meets The Girl but apparently for the first time, acquainting themselves in an outside world which no-one has seen since the attack. The play ends with the pair agreeing to explore the new world together.
An original manuscript for The Season is held in the Ayckbourn Archive at the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York.
The Season quotation
Girl: Please don’t talk like that. I am afraid. It would be like the winter - death would. I know it. Cold and white with no colours at all. Everything sharp and pointed - the trees spiky like the icicles that hang from the branches and the wind brushing over the snow and biting through your bones - eating you away.
All research for this page is by Simon Murgatroyd and should not be reproduced without permission.