The Karaoke Theatre Company: Quotes by Alan Ayckbourn
“My maxim has always been ‘scare yourself’ and with this I’m absolutely terrified. For the first time I have absolutely no idea if it’s going to work. It’s one of my big tenets, it always has been, that the special thing about theatre is that it is live. Every ten years a group of us sit down and collectively ask ‘is theatre worth pursuing?’ Now that the other media can outstrip us in every way, particularly with CGI [Computer Generated Imagery] and the like, it is a more relevant question than ever. The only thing that we have, the thing that separates us from all other media, is that we are live. So you have to think about how do we make the most of that? All we can do is put five or six breathing, real human beings on stage with several hundred other breathing, real human beings in the audience and create something there and then. It’s been there all the time with my apparently 'random' plays. From House & Garden, where the cast appear in two plays simultaneously, to Sisterly Feelings, where a coin was tossed and the choice of action decided on heads or tails, I kept saying to the audience, subliminally I hope, 'this is live, this is live'. You won’t see anything like this on film or television because this is only happening now, here and for you.”(Yorkshire Post, 3 July 2016)
"Maybe I will learn a lot from writing something like this and perhaps it will inform my next plays.”
(Yorkshire Post, 3 July 2016)
"It was destined in the schedule to be play number 80, but it seemed a bit invidious having your 80th play produced! I thought what should I do instead? I decided, in the end, to do a party. I thought what better way than for the actors and audience to sort of meet."
(Interview, June 2016)
"They're a sort of fictional troupe, probably based in somewhere like Dewsbury."
(The Press, 8 July 2016)
"The evening is designed slightly for people like me who normally would confront a company like this with horror, where there is audience participation and improvisation, but we're gently lulling people into it; we don't throw them in at the deep end; we let them paddle at the shallow end. We've had no more than 12 people at a time [in rehearsals] and you can see some of them thinking, 'I wouldn't mind doing that', and once one of them has 'entered the water' and says 'ooh, it's warm in here', then the others will join them. Normally, I am sort of terribly control-freakish. I love my productions to be absolutely meticulous by the time they reach the stage, but this time I've whipped the gang plank away and the play is free to fall and I've no idea where it will land."
(Sunday Times, 24 July 2016)
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