Alan Ayckbourn was born in London in 1939. He has worked in theatre all his life as, variously, stage manager, sound technician, lighting technician, scene painter, prop maker, actor, writer and director. Most of these talents he developed (or abandoned) thanks to his mentor and founder of the Theatre at Scarborough, Stephen Joseph, who first encouraged. him to write. Almost all of the 60 or so plays he has written to date received their first performances at

Woman In Mind follows Ayckbourn's familiar themes of oblivious husbands, of disappointing, self-destructive marriages held together with a thin veneer of homely pretence.

Again and again he writes of men and women unable to understand or live with one another, of attempted niceness that hurts rather than helps, of parents who unwittingly maim their children for life. Every one of these themes finds its way into Woman In Mind. Of course, being Ayckbourn, the comedy is exhilarating but the tragedy in the play is never far from the surface. Woman In Mind illustrates exactly Ayckbourn's definition of comedy as "a tragedy that has been interrupted".
Norman Wilkinson