Book description
Love stories yet to happen, in a future filled with surprises. Who
is the amorous stranger, Titus, who materialises in young Grace's
bedroom? Can she believe he is who he says he is? For her parents,
Franklin and Martha, does love everlasting still hold true if death is
postponed indefinitely? Can lawyer Lorraine, who prides herself on her
infallibility, have finally discovered the ideal partner, one who is
also never wrong? Will lonely secretary Sylvia, after unhappy affairs
with everyone from deep sea divers to space shuttle pilots, ever find
her Mr Right? A comedy with its head in the future and its heart in
the past, Alan Ayckbourn's Surprises premiered in July 2012 at the
Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, in a co-production with
Chichester Festival Theatre.
Alan Ayckbourn was born in London in 1939 to a violinist father and a
mother who was a writer. He left school at seventeen with two 'A' levels
and went straight into the theatre. Two years in regional theatre as an
actor and stage manager led in 1959 to the writing of his first play,
The Square Cat, for Scarborough's Theatre in the Round at the
instigation of his then employer and subsequent mentor, Stephen Joseph.
Some 75 plays later, his work has been translated into over 35
languages, is performed on stage and television throughout the world and
has won countless awards. There have been English and French screen
adaptations, the most notable being Alain Resnais' fine film of Private
Fears in Public Places. Major successes include Relatively Speaking, How
the Other Half Loves, Absurd Person Singular, Bedroom Farce, A Chorus of
Disapproval, The Norman Conquests, A Small Family Business, Henceforward
..., Comic Potential, Things We Do For Love, and, most recently, Life of
Riley. In 2009, he retired as Artistic Director of the Stephen Joseph
Theatre, where almost all his plays have been and continue to be first
staged, after 37 years in the post. He received the 2010 Critics' Circle
Award for Services to the Arts and became the first British play wright
to receive both Olivier and Tony Special Lifetime Achievement Awards. He
was knighted in 1997 for services to the theatre.
