Alan Ayckbourn Grinning at the Edge

"In this biography Paul Allen explores Ayckbourn's family background, looking at his unsettled and sometimes solitary childhood. There follows a hasty first marriage, the often farcical life of a frustrated young actor, and the setbacks and false dawns endured by the novice writer before he became the great comic hit-maker of the 1970s. Audiences since have been literally falling into the aisles with laughter, even as they register the seriousness of his preoccupation with mans inhumanity to woman. With the first-hand testimony of scores of colleagues who have worked with Ayckbourn at length in Scarborough as well as the more celebrated London collaborators, Allen traces the development of his more savagely comic critique of public life in the 1980s and 90s."--BOOK JACKET.