Joking Apart: In Brief
Joking Apart
Play Number: 22World Premiere: 12 January 1978
Venue: Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round, Scarborough
Premiere Staging: In-the-round
Published: Samuel French
Other Media: Radio
Cast: 4m / 4f
Run Time: 2hrs
Synopsis: Set over four celebrations over 12 years, Joking Apart centres on an apparently 'golden' couple and the effect their ‘perfect’ relationship has on their friends and their own relationships.
- Joking Apart is Alan Ayckbourn's 22nd play.
- The world premiere - directed by Alan Ayckbourn - was held at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough, on 12 January 1978.
- The London premiere - directed by Alan Ayckbourn - took place at the Globe Theatre on 7 March 1979.
- The playwright considers it one of his 'winter' plays, three plays in succession written for the first time during the winter months in Scarborough. Alan attributes the darkness found in Just Between Ourselves, Ten Times Table and Joking Apart to writing at this time of year.
- The main inspiration came from a letter asking him why he never wrote plays about happy couples. The answer being, of course, dramatically it's not terribly interesting, but it inspired him to address how to write a play with a 'golden couple'.
- Other inspirations came from hearing about a vicar who lost his faith and the realisation his son was now 18 and the passage of time.
- Joking Apart covered, when it was written, the longest span of time of any Ayckbourn play encompassing 12 years from the first scene to the last. This has since been surpassed by several plays such as A Brief History of Women.
- The play is one of Alan Ayckbourn's exterior garden-set plays - the garden of Richard and Anthea - which also includes plays such as Relatively Speaking, Round And Round The Garden, Just Between Ourselves, Garden and Snake In The Grass amongst others. For the original production, real turf was used on the set as it discovered it was cheaper to buy and maintain real grass in the auditorium than buy artificial turf!
- Snake In The Grass shares the same set requirements as Joking Apart (including the tennis court and summer-house) as Alan Ayckbourn wrote Snake In The Grass knowing the world premiere production would be in repertory with Joking Apart.
- The original London production won the 1979 Plays & Players Award for Best Comedy.
- Joking Apart was adapted for the radio by the BBC in 1981 and 1990.
- Alan Ayckbourn has repeatedly noted that - of his own writing - it is one of his favourite plays.
- Although published as a play text by Samuel French, Joking Apart was also published in the collection Joking Apart and Other Plays (Chatto & Windus, later Penguin).