Alan Ayckbourn

Kenneth Williams letter going up for auction

Unpublished letters in which Kenneth Williams calls Alan Ayckbourn's plays "rubbish" will go up for auction later this month.

Review: Woman in Mind

Alan Ayckbourn's Woman in Mind is a consistently funny play dealing with the anxieties and missed opportunities middle-age brings.

It has been a long march for The League Of Gentlemen's Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith since their original (very original) TV series in 1999. With each subsequent venture they have scrambled farther over the top. Inside No. 9, a series of one-off plays each taking place at a different address starting with 9, represents a retreat to firmer ground.

Last night's debut was much less fantastical than their last series Psychoville, free of prosthetics and cross-dressing. It dealt, as per, with incest and abuse, but in the manner that Alan Ayckbourn might. The Greek ruled that plays should take place over a single day in a single place. Sardines occurred over half an hour in a single wardrobe. It occupied a wall in an outsized family house, the scene of uptight daughter Rebecca's engagement party. Childhood momentum had propelled her and brother Carl (Pemberton), a man barely out of the closet and about to enter a wardrobe, into a game of sardines that no one wanted to play.

Katherine Parkinson's Rebecca was a superb study in congenital dissatisfaction, about to marry a man whose previous lover is not only still on his mind but in the wardrobe. The whole party ends up in there, including the dull, quiet one (beware the dull, quiet ones, they are usually the writers' surrogates). It is Carl, though, who outs the elephant in the wardrobe, a sexual assault on a child by his bullying father: "I was teaching the boy how to wash himself!" responds the father.

Anne Reid, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Anna Chancellor must have so enjoyed getting dialogue in which each sentence was minutely crafted for them. My favourite line may even have come from Timothy West as the patriarch complaining at a transgressing of sardine rules: "This isn't hide-and-go-seek". Was that posh for "hide and seek" or a unique verbal corruption?

Sardines was a disciplined comedy, but a little bit of discipline, as one of the League's perverts might say, never did anyone any harm. Save for the Tales of the Unexpected twist, I loved it.

Video: Rob Brydon makes West End debut

Rob Brydon has made his West End stage debut in Alan Ayckbourn's A Chorus of Disapproval.

The comedian and actor stars opposite former EastEnders star Nigel Harman/p] and Ugly Betty's Ashley Jensen in the revival of the 1984 comedy under the direction of Trevor Nunn at the Harold Pinter Theatre.

He grew a beard for the part of Dafydd, the director of an amateur operatic society production.

Brydon told BBC Wales Today reporter Matt Murray it was the "perfect opening night" while opera star Bryn Terfel and comedian Jimmy Carr gave their views on the first night.

Ashley Jensen interview

Ashley Jensen found fame opposite Ricky Gervais in Extras and then in America in Ugly Betty. She talks about her return to the stage in Alan Ayckbourn's comedy A Chorus of Disapproval.

Rob Brydon to make West End debut

Rob Brydon is to make his West End acting debut later this year in Alan Ayckbourn's A Chorus of Disapproval.

This observant, understated series of mildly comedic mini-plays (really, it's not a sitcom) about a contentedly married couple slaps us with a half-hour that prompts more tears than chuckles. Roger's cousin Cathy and her unpleasant husband Bob (a misogynist control freak who likes to order for his dinner companions in restaurants) are coming to stay. So most of the talking happens in the spartan spare bedroom, which, we learn, no one has slept in for 17 years. As the couple strip down the mattress, faff over the arrangement of knick-knacks and work out emergency escape routes (this episode's only hoot-worthy moment), the atmosphere is claustrophobic and fraught. At first it's not clear why. When the reason emerges, the pair's marital back-and-forth, which usually veers from sanguine rumination to fidgety bickering, dissolves into drowning sadness. It's a curious move for a supposed comedy, but somehow not out of place. Four episodes in, Dawn French and Alfred Molina are still tickling us - although sometimes it's with the tiniest feather. There are never any belly laughs, but we don't need them. There's something wonderfully subtle and assured about the dialogue, like a grown-up Wallace & Gromit that's been given a polish by Alan Ayckbourn.

When a play tackles subjects as ethics of have-a-go heroics, redemption and reconciliation, and the cult of celebrity, you fear that something has to give. But when the play is written by Alan Ayckbourn, stars Tim Pigott-Smith, Janie Dee and Alex Jennings, and is directed by Martin Jarvis you can lay those fears to rest.

It's the tale of Vic Parks, a criminal who, having spent nine years in jail for a botched bank robbery, has become a television celebrity. Now he is to appear on a TV show in which the host Jill Rellington intends to bring him face to face with Douglas Beechey - the unassuming clerk who foiled the robbery.

The production retains Ayckbourn's comic touch by asking why society is more in thrall to villains than heroes, and keeps the laughs dark right to the end.