Consuming Passions: Quotes by Alan Ayckbourn
"I describe Consuming Passions as slightly Hitchcockian in we don't know if the protagonist is mad or isn’t. It’s a little bit of a thriller about a woman who overhears a murder plot, but has she really overheard a murder plot or is she fantasising about it? Is it something that hasn’t yet happened? It’s all a bit The Twilight Zone and quite fun."Interview with Simon Murgatroyd, 24 February 2016
"Consuming Passions is my 80th [play] and is one play with two named acts…. It makes no sense to see only half of it and certainly less sense to see them in a different order."
(Private correspondence, 4 July 2016)
"Consuming Passions is officially play 80. Most of my plays are written with an intention in mind and one of the intentions with this was to get back to normality again after The Karaoke Theatre Company! Secondly, they were written - partly following my experiment a couple of years ago with Farcicals - to bring theatre back into the restaurant space. It’s a play in two parts and you really do need to see them in the right order - although they can be seen in any order, I suppose. I call it my Hitchcockian phase. It’s a sort of comedy, yet it’s a thriller with a 'did she, didn't she?' theme. It’s got a lot of the Hitchcock motifs: the ice blonde at the centre who has murderous intentions, the hapless lover etc."
(Interview, June 2016)
"They're a Technicolor light thriller where you wonder whether a woman really can see into the future or is she in fact nuts?"
(The Press, 6 August 2016)
"It's a great art is the short play. I've always loved them, but I hadn't done any for a long time, not since the Ten By Ten season [1998]*, until I did Farcicals two years ago. I always thought I wasn't a writer of short plays but now I discover I am. It's a great skill writing one-act plays; the great thing is to get the play going, otherwise it might have finished when you have only just started! So it's an exercise in brevity and being concise without being like a flicker book. You need a twist in it too."
(The Press, 6 August 2016)
*It is not clear what the playwright is referring to here as he did not write any one act plays for the Ten By Ten season in 1998; although he did direct several one act plays during the season.
Copyright: Haydonning Ltd.