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.Mind Over Murder
Mind Over Murder is a very rare example of Alan Ayckbourn writing a play and a screenplay of the same material, as well as marking his first attempt at a thriller.The piece exists as two manuscripts, both with the same title - Mind Over Murder: A Play - and both attributed to Roland Allen (Alan’s writing pseudonym between 1959 and 1961). The first manuscript is an incomplete play-text - the final pages are missing but given the existence of the second manuscript, the implication is the pages were lost rather than not completed. The second manuscript, despite being labelled ‘a play' is a complete and detailed screenplay; in all likelihood, the play-text adapted for television as the actual dialogue is identical.
Although not dated, the use of the name Roland Allen and the existence of the screenplay allows it to be placed between late 1959 and mid-1960; following the success of his first play, The Square Cat, Alan noted in an interview he and his wife Christine Roland had written several treatments for proposed screenplays in the hope of receiving a commission for television. It is probable, given Alan has rarely shown any other interest in writing screenplays, that Mind Over Murder was one of these ideas.
Mind Over Murder has a cast of six and takes place over four days with a policeman investigating the apparent suspicious death of a professor’s sister. The professor - who has an improbable knack for Sherlock Holmes style deduction - solves the mystery of who murdered his sister and for what purpose, whilst the police inspector plays the role of Watson to the professor’s Sherlock.
Notably, the plot jumps about over the four days revealing previous events as the murder is unraveled. Taken as a whole, it is a rather formulaic piece which overly relies on the apparent eccentric genius of the Professor, whose wandering mind is able to make astonishing deductive leaps.
Professor: (calling softly) Michael!... Michael!
Inspector Michael Roberts steps suddenly from out of the shadows bedside him.
Michael: Right beside you Edward.
Professor: (Startled) Oh my dear fellow, must you skulk in the shadows like that or is it part of your police training?
Michael: I was observing the moonlight on the roof, it managed to bring out the beauty of those Victorian Twiddley [sic] bits. This house must be amazingly ugly by daylight.
Professor: My sister was fascinated by the hideous. Just wait until you see the inside.
While Mind Over Murder was neither produced as a play nor screenplay, it is of interest if purely for marking Alan’s first attempt to write a thriller so early in his career - certainly given his later attempts to successfully crack the genre.
Until Mind Over Murder came to light, Alan’s first acknowledged attempt at a thriller was the announced but unwritten Sight Unseen in 1980 which formed the basis of his random murderer thriller It Could Be Any One Of Us in 1982. The latter was deemed unsatisfactory by the playwright - and lacked an actual murder - until he eventually revised the play to his satisfaction in 1996.
Although other plays such as The Revengers’ Comedies (1989) have elements of the genre in them, his most successful attempt at writing a thriller is considered to be his 2002 play Snake In The Grass.
An original manuscript for Mind Over Murder is held in the Ayckbourn Archive at the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York.
All research for this page is by Simon Murgatroyd and should not be reproduced without permission.