A treat to read and a joy to perform, this second collection of Alan Ayckbourn's work is a cornucopia of some of his wonderfully inventive children's plays. From the story of the teenage Lucy in Invisible Friends who revives her childhood imaginary friend when things get difficult at home, onto the storytellers in My Very Own Story and This Is Where We Came In and, finally, to young Ernie who 'illucinates' all sorts of wild and weird happenings with astonishing results.

 

This book is aimed at the following children: primary school, secondary school .

There are 496 pages in this book. This book was published 1998 by Faber & Faber .

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.