There are few Ayckbourn plays where you can definitely point to a distinct inspiration. Yet Alan has always been frank that Time Of My Life developed as a result of him being a self-confessed “terrible eavesdropper" in restaurants. Here we have a play where the audience are the eavesdroppers, witnessing the ordinary traumas of a normal Yorkshire family.
The play also developed from Alan’s desire to experiment with time. This was not new territory from him (as seen in the real time setting of Absent Friends) or of any other playwright. Indeed, Alan credits one of his inspirations to being J.B. Priestley and his plays which deal with time. What was original in Alan’s writing was in creating a play where the past, present and future are all revealed within the course of one evening.
The play centres on a birthday gathering at a restaurant. After the initial scene, the mother and father’s stay is presented in two hours of real time. Interwoven and juxtaposed with this and each other are the plots of the two sons and their relationships. The oldest son’s story moves forward over time, encompassing two years and revealing the father died shortly after they left the restaurant. The youngest son’s plot moves backwards over the course of two months, revealing the beginning of a relationship which we see disintegrate in the forward moving strand.
It is a very clever play and, as Alan noted at the time, "daringly static for me". The play juxtaposes events from the past and future, playing with what knowledge the audience has and which the characters frequently do not have. It is undoubtedly quite a bleak play and its central message that we don’t tend to recognise the moments when we are truly happy is one of the harsher truths to emerge from an Ayckbourn play.
Time Of My Life is also a very frank exploration of the institute of marriage and possibly one of the most insightful with regard to Alan’s opinions on the subject. The play deals with three relationships: Gerry and Laura who have been together all their lives, despite the fact their marriage has become little more than a convenience. In Laura’s character, we have a cynical woman who has manipulated her marriage and her family to achieve what she wants. She is an unsentimental and hard woman, who was once obviously very attractive to Gerry. Her character believably allows us to accept Laura’s ability to transform her life after Gerry’s death; although Gerry meant much to her, ultimately she will not lose her life because he is no longer there.
We are also presented with Glyn and Adam’s relationships. Adam is in the early, unexpected throes of a passionate relationship which makes it all the harder when we see the relationship falter and fail despite all his efforts, largely due to the malicious devices of Laura. In Glyn, we see a doomed marriage of a perpetually weak man, cowed by his mother from youth, and the effect this has on his wife. It is only after their marriage collapses and his wife Stephanie believes she has lost it all, that she discovers just how much potential she has and how much she has wasted on a man who is not what he initially appeared to be.
This is not a happy view of marriage, which concurs with the numerous interviews where Alan talks about marriage and his view that men and women are, ultimately, unable to live with each other and that those who do, do so at a cost to their characters and lifestyles.
The play opened at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round, Scarborough, in April 1992 with Russell Dixon and Colette O’Neil playing Gerry and Laura. Despite lukewarm reviews and its apparent bleakness, the play went down well with the Scarborough audiences. Michael Codron decided to produce it in London with Alan directing the original cast with the exception of Gerry and Laura now played by Anton Rodgers and Gwen Taylor. It opened at the Vaudeville in August 1993 and had mixed reviews, but it is generally agreed a good production was largely lost and it did not have a long run in the West End.
Time Of My Life is another play of Alan’s from the late ‘80s / early ‘90s that largely seems to have been forgotten. This is a real loss as it is not only a technically clever play but an often funny and truthful look at relationships, written in such a manner we learn more about the characters and empathise with them more than we could in a typical narrative. To critics at the time, who felt Alan had been going into strange and unnecessary territory with the more fantastic ideas of Wildest Dreams and Body Language, it seems to have been rather lost that this is a play which – stripped of its structure – deals very much with the Ayckbourn themes that had apparently been lacking: that of the relationships between men and women, families and the institute of marriage.

Copyright: Simon Murgatroyd 2006 / Image copyright: Adrian Gatie. Please do not reproduce these images without the permission of the copyright holder.