Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Ayckbourn, Alan (Vol. 18) - Eric Shorter

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ERIC SHORTER

Alan Ayckbourn's comedies have become such money-spinners and he himself has won such general critical acclaim that it is difficult to think of him as an experimental dramatist. He has however probably done as much as any other living playwright to use the stage with an original sense of its scope—to stretch its scenic and dramatic possibilities. How The Other Half Loves, for example, with two separate dinners on different dates happening on the stage at the same time surely extended the range of theatrical craftsmanship.

And now in his latest piece Sisterly Feelings his ingenuity goes a step further in a direction which strikes me as having the most puzzling future yet. For if The Norman Conquests took us round the same domestic situation in three plays, each set in a different room, how is one to view Sisterly Feelings? Each of The Norman Conquests plays had a different title. You could be sure what you were...

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1. Introduction
2. Guido Almansi
3. Eric Shorter
4. Brendan Gill
5. John Simon
6. Harold Clurman
7. Anthony Curtis
8. Benedict Nightingale
9. Copyright