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When it comes to Alan Ayckbourn, there’s little that Simon Murgatroyd doesn’t know. As the playwright’s official archivist and website manager he could write an entire book - which is exactly what he has done. Nick Smurthwaite from The Stage investigates. Did you know that Alan Ayckbourn was once an assistant stage manager in Donald Wolfit’s touring company? Or that Britain’s most produced playwright was a radio drama producer in Leeds for five years in the 1960s? Look in the biography listing on Ayckbourn’s official website and you will discover things even his most ardent fans didn’t know. It is crying out for a Mastermind contestant to come along, hoover up its 3500 pages and present John Humphrys with the Bard of Scarborough as their specialist subject. The person responsible for collating and recording all this Ayckbournalia is his official archivist and website editor Simon Murgatroyd, a former dancer and journalist who set up the website in 2001, and is about to publish Unseen Ayckbourn, a book about the playwright’s early writings. Murgatroyd, who has lived in Scarborough since childhood and once worked in the box office at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, is uniquely qualified to lay claim to the title of the world’s greatest Ayckbourn expert, since he wrote a 65,000-word dissertation on the playwright while studying for his MA. “There was a misunderstanding between myself and the university about the word count,” he axplains. “I was actually only required to write 25,000 words, but luckily they allowed me to submit it anyway. It took me two years, and I rather naively thought I would learn form my tutors, but they said I knew more about my subject than they did, so they just let me get on with it.”
students would be encouraged to use it freely. He is a strong believer that knowledge shouldn’t come at a premium. We meet up most days, but he allows me free reign. The only time he raised his eyebrows was when I suggested a Facebook page. he didn’t think that was a good idea. “The remit is quite strict - to provide factual information about the plays and the playwright, and to be objective.” No other living British Playwright has anything remotely comparable. the closest are the Pinter website, which pre-dates Murgatroyd’s and provided a measur eof inspiration, and that of Andrew Lloyd Webber, a no-expense-spared bells and whistles extravaganza, which Murgatroyd describes as “very slick.” Where the Ayckbourn site is without peer is in its in-depth analysis of his output. Given that he has written 77 plays and counting, that is a considerable feat on Murgatroyd’s behalf. In addition to his own detailed interviews with the playwright, Murgatroyd has also borrowed liberally from the massive Ayckbourn archive held, since 2011, at the Borthwick Institute at the University of York, as well as the Bob Watson archive, which is more concerned with the Stephen Joseph Theatre as a whole, for which the upkeep Murgatroyd is now responsible.
looking at Ayckbourn’s early work, some of it abandoned, unpublished or subsequently re-written. He has now revised, expanded and updated it, and included a new interview about the early work. This latest edition, re-titled Unseen Ayckbourn, will be available to order from the website’s shop section from May next year, with proceeds going to the Stephen Joseph Theatre. One thing that strikes you about the shop is the dearth of Ayckbourn plays availabkle on DVD. Apparently, despite his enduring popularity among the world’s theatregoers, there is no demand for any permanent record of his work. The excellent 1977 film-for-TV version of The Norman Conquests was withdrawn after two years, and Michael Winner’s feeble 1989 big-screen version of A Chorus of Disapproval, despite a starry cast, failed to do justice to the play. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Ayckbourn has never shown much interest in writing for TV or the cinema, and his devotion to theatre-in-theround has more or less ruled out filming plays at Scarborough. He is quintessentially a man of the theatre, and Murgatroyd’s achievement has been to celebrate and annotate that for posterity. www.alanayckbourn.net
Last year, the website surpassed one million page views, and reckons to get an average of 1,600 unique visitors every day.
Having struggled o find reference material pertaining to Ayckbourn’s plays, Murgatroyd decided to set up the website, with the playwright’s blessing, to help other students in their researches. It went from 30 pages in the early days to the present, definitive online resource, providing in-depth analysis of the plays, penetrating and insightful interviews conducted by Murgatroyd, and a commentary on his work by the playwright himself.
Because Ayckbourn’s plays are produced and studied in amny foreign countries, Murgatroyd fields numerous queries from all over the world. “Generally speaking they are in English, but it is not always very clear what people are asking for,” he explins. “I have one from some German students recently, appearing to ask why A Small Family Business finished with a chainsaw massacre, which I have to say stumped me.”
“Alan and I were both keen it should be a free resource - no advertising, no subscription - so that
In 2009, to mark the playwright’s 70th birthday, Murgatroyd published a book, Sight Unseen,
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