Throughout the preparation of this book, I have been nourished by the assistance and encouragement of others, and I am grateful for the op portunity to thank them for their contributions. The incisive comments and illuminating exhortations of William I. Oliver have enriched this project from start to finish. His faith and fomentations, together with innumerable perusals of manuscript drafts, have inspired this study and made its writing a joy. For their helpful criticisms of various drafts, I wish also to thank George House, William Nestrick, Charles R. Lyons, and Ernest Callenbach, each of whom advised distinct revisions that have enhanced the final version of this study. Weldon A. Kefauver, the Editorial Board of the Ohio State University Press, and their readers have provided generous support and advice, for which I am grateful as well. The process of researching and preparing this book has been indis pensably facilitated by an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University and by faculty research grants from Middlebury College and the University of Denver. I am pleased to acknowledge their investment in this book, which has profited also from the hospi tality of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint from their publications: Associated Book Publishers; The Bodley Head; British Film Institute; Corporate Trust N.V.; Grove Press, Inc.; Hamish Hamilton Limited; Harlan Kennedy; Methuen London Ltd.; Ran dom House, Inc.; Stein and Day Publishers; and Anthony Sheil Associates Ltd. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to Mark A. Rhoda, whose pa tience, generosity, keen eye, and hard work have contributed liberally to the production of this text. His devotion and labor have served me im measurably in this task and in others.
This article examines Alan Ayckbourn’s two linked plays, House & Garden, in the context of an entire career exploring the limits and boundaries of theatrical conventions. As the driving force and artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, a complex which houses two theatres – a proscenium stage and a theatre-in-the-round – the playwright/director has a flexible, state-of-the-art laboratory in which to experiment with theatrical elements which have always fascinated him. In House & Garden, Ayckbourn stretches stage boundaries in unprecedented ways by writing two plays to be performed simultaneously in two adjacent auditoria – a comedy of manners for the proscenium and a carnivalesque farce for the round. Stephanie Tucker analyzes how this unprecedented dramatic diptych exploits the possibilities of theatrical space, on and offstage, whilst appropriating elements from traditions as various as Greek satyr plays and nineteenth-century drama, and from venues as disparate as the carnival square and the drawing room. This experiment, she argues, forces audiences to re-examine preconceived notions concerning theatre’s relationship to the ‘real’ world, a theme which runs through Ayckbourn’s opus. Stephanie Tucker, who teaches at California State University, Sacramento, has published articles on various aspects of contemporary British and American theatre and is presently engaged upon a book-length study of Ayckbourn’s drama and stagecraft.
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