Sir Alan Ayckbourn is a prolific British playwright and director. He has written and produced as of 2023, 89 full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967.
Richard David Briers was an English actor whose five-decade career encompassed film, radio, stage and television.
Sir Thomas Daniel Courtenay is an English actor. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Courtenay achieved prominence in the 1960s with a series of acclaimed film roles, including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), for which he received the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles, and Doctor Zhivago (1965), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Other notable film roles during this period include Billy Liar (1963), King and Country (1964), for which he was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, King Rat (1965), and The Night of the Generals (1967). For his performance in the 1983 film adaptation of the play The Dresser, in which he reprised the role of Norman he originated both on the West End and Broadway, Courtenay won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor and received Academy and BAFTA Award nominations. More recently, he received critical acclaim for his performance in Andrew Haigh's film 45 Years (2015).
Sir Michael John Gambon is an Irish-English actor. Gambon started his acting career with Laurence Olivier as one of the original members of the Royal National Theatre. Over his six-decade-long career he has received three Olivier Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and four BAFTA Awards. In 1999, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to drama.
The Old Vic is a 1,000-seat, not-for-profit producing theatre in Waterloo, London, England. Established in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, and renamed in 1833 the Royal Victoria Theatre. In 1871 it was rebuilt and reopened as the Royal Victoria Palace. It was taken over by Emma Cons in 1880 and formally named the Royal Victoria Hall, although by that time it was already known as the "Old Vic". In 1898, a niece of Cons, Lilian Baylis, assumed management and began a series of Shakespeare productions in 1914. The building was damaged in 1940 during air raids and it became a Grade II* listed building in 1951 after it reopened.
Jill Halfpenny is an English actress. Her notable roles include Rebecca Hopkins in ITV soap opera Coronation Street (1999–2000), Kate Mitchell in BBC One soap opera EastEnders (2002–2005), Izzie Redpath in Waterloo Road (2006–2007), and Diane Manning in In The Club (2014–2016). She won the second series of the television dance contest Strictly Come Dancing in 2004.
Claire Skinner is an English actress, known in the United Kingdom for her television career, particularly playing Sue Brockman from the BBC television series Outnumbered.
Amanda Root is an English stage and screen actress and a former voice actress for children's programmes.
Matthew Warchus is a British theatre director, filmmaker and dramaturg. He has been the Artistic Director of London's The Old Vic since September 2015.
Mixed Doubles: An Entertainment on Marriage is a programme consisting of a series of eight short plays or revue sketches, each with two characters, composed by various English playwrights. It was first performed on 6 February 1969 in the Hampstead Theatre Club with the title, We Who Are About To.... The programme was then presented as Mixed Doubles: An Entertainment on Marriage at the Comedy Theatre, London, on 9 April 1969.
Gwendoline Watford, professionally known after the mid-1950s as Gwen Watford, was an English actress.
William Wallis was a British character actor and comedian who appeared in numerous radio and television roles, as well as in the theatre.
Peter Blythe was an English character actor, probably best known as Samuel "Soapy Sam" Ballard in Rumpole of the Bailey.
Adrian Philip Scarborough is an English actor.
Janie Dee is an English actress and singer. She won the Olivier Award for Best Actress, Evening Standard Award and Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Play, and in New York the Obie and Theatre World Award for Best Newcomer, for her performance as Jacie Triplethree in Alan Ayckbourn's Comic Potential.
If I Were You is a 2006 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. It is about an unhappy married couple who are given the chance to understand each other by discovering, quite literally, what they would do "if I were you," in the same manner as the novel Turnabout by Thorne Smith.
Christopher Douglas is a British actor and writer. He is the voice of Ed Reardon in BBC Radio 4's long-running sitcom Ed Reardon's Week, which he co-writes with Andrew Nickolds. Ed Reardon's Week has completed fourteen series and was the winner of the Broadcasting Press Guild's "Best Radio Programme" award in 2005 and again in 2010. Douglas is also the voice and co-creator of the world's most disappointing cricketer Dave Podmore, a Radio 4 regular since 2017.
A Small Family Business is a play by Alan Ayckbourn about the eponymous business and dealing with the Thatcherism of the time. It premiered at the Olivier stage of the Royal National Theatre on 20 May 1987, where it won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play for that year. Its Broadway premiere occurred on 27 April 1992.
Edward William Chaillet, III is a radio drama producer and director, writer and journalist.
David Bark-Jones is an English actor. He has appeared in numerous film, theatre and TV productions, he won Broadwayworld.com's Best Actor in a West End Play 2010, for his portrayal of Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps.
