My Very Own Story: In Brief
My Very Own Story
Play Number: 43World Premiere: 10 August 1991
Venue: Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round, Scarborough
Premiere Staging: In-the-round
Published: Samuel French
Other Media: No
Cast: 7m / 6f
Run Time: 1hr 35m
Synopsis: Three story-tellers arrive, triple-booked and each determined to tell their own stories - even if the others insist on making their presences felt in each story.
- My Very Own Story is Alan Ayckbourn's 43rd play.
- The world premiere - directed by Alan Ayckbourn - was held at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in The Round, Scarborough, on 10 August 1991.
- It was originally presented in 1991 as a family show for Saturday mornings at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough.
- The following year, it was presented as the main house show during the Christmas period at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round..
- The central motif of the play is the number three; a number Alan Ayckbourn has frequently said is significant for writers. He believes he needs three ideas for a play before it works and that important information often has to be mentioned (subtly!) three times before the audience absorbs it.
- It is one of his 'family' plays; these plays are written with a family audience in mind, but are considered by the playwright to be part of his full-length play canon and as significant in his canon as any of the other plays. Alan Ayckbourn's first family play is considered to be Mr A's Amazing Maze Plays in 1988.
- My Very Own Story is considered to be a companion piece to This Is Where We Came In (1990), another family play in which Alan Ayckbourn questions the conventions of story-telling although in very different ways.
- In the world premiere production and the 1992 revival, the theatre's musical director John Pattison performed music live on stage credited as The Keyboard Player.
- My Very Own Story is considered to be one of Alan Ayckbourn's plays in the fantasy genre (as opposed to, for example, science-fiction, thriller, etc). Other plays in the fantasy genre include Dreams From A Summer House, Orvin - Champion Of Champions and Awaking Beauty.
- It has been argued that whilst many of Alan Ayckbourn's family plays are inspired be or thematically related to his 'adult' plays, My Very Own Story is the first to reverse the trend and was one of the inspirations for the play Improbable Fiction.
- Although published as a play text by Samuel French, My Very Own Story was also published in the collection Alan Ayckbourn: Plays 2 (Faber).