Alan Ayckbourn's play..

Confusions

Now indisputably hailed as Britain's most popular living dramatist, Alan Ayckbourn has been compared to Shakespeare for both his popularity and his prolific output - now more than 60 plays. Indeed, he is the second most performed playwright in the world after Shakespeare.

Alan Ayckbourn is director of a theatre company in the Yorkshire seaside town of Scarborough, and each year he has teetered precipitously on the edge of catastrophe by finishing his plays sometimes only hours before the first rehearsal, driving around Scarborough at midnight to deliver scripts to anxious actors, having them snatched from his hand as he feeds them through the letterbox! For more than thirty years he has written and staged a new play, in a theatre-in-the-round, as part of his season, and almost invariably the following year that play has transferred to the west End.

Alan Ayckbourn left school at 17, on a Friday and, thanks to an introduction by his French master, started working as an acting Assistant Stage manager with Sir Donald Wolfit's company the following Monday! He has been involved in the theatre ever since. He joined the Stephen Joseph Theatre-in-the-Round, Scarborough as an actor and stagemanager in 1957, and it was here that his first play The Square Cat first saw the light of day. He then went to work all over England before returning to the Stephen Joseph Theatre as Artistic Director.

Alan Ayckbourn was appointed a CBE in 1987 and knighted for services to the theatre in 1997. Confusions is the ninth Ayckbourn play performed by The St Ursula Players and each one has proved hugely popular with our audiences. Tonight's play follows the lives of four sets of dysfunctional characters whose inability to communicate with their nearest and dearest cause the loneliness and "confusion" on which the story line is based. Audiences may find the Fifth Scene even more confusing! During many hilarious rehearsals we have talked about Ayckbourn's intentions in following the riotously funny "Gosforth's Fete" with this rather downbeat scene and have come to the conclusion (although I am sure there are many others which you will arrive at) that what the playwright is saying is that if the characters in the preceding scenes do not find ways of communicating, they will end up like the characters in "A Talk in the Park" - alone, talking to themselves on a bench in the park.

The actors have had enormous fun during the rehearsal period of this play, the props department have torn their hair out tracking down lobsters, tea urns and assorted baby gear etc.' the backstage crew have had a busy time interpreting Paul's intricate scaled drawings, and we hope that you, our valued audience, will once again enjoy Alan Ayckbourn at his very best.