Standing Room Only: In Brief
Standing Room Only
Play Number: 4World Premiere: 13 July 1961
Venue: Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre, Scarborough
Premiere Staging: In-the-round
Published: No
Other Media: No
Cast: 3m / 3f
Synopsis: Set in a future where the nation's roads have become permanently gridlocked, it follows a family's life in their home, a stranded double-decker bus, and how they deal with an illegal pregnancy.
Note: Standing Room Only has never been published, nor is it available to produce. Original manuscripts are held in the British Library and the Ayckbourn Archive at the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York.
- Standing Room Only is Alan Ayckbourn's 4th play.
- The world premiere - directed by Stephen Joseph - was held at Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre, Scarborough, on 13 July 1961.
- It is the earliest of Ayckbourn's play to have a professional production in London (although not in the West End), when it was performed for one night at the British Council's London Oversea Students' Centre by Cygnet Productions on 12 June 1966.
- It was the final play to be attributed to Alan Ayckbourn's writing pseudonym Roland Allen...
- However, when it was revived in 1963, it was credited to Alan Ayckbourn - also making it the first play to be attributed to Alan Ayckbourn.
- Stephen Joseph originally asked for a play set in Venus dealing with the over-population of the planet after Earth had also become over-populated and decamped to Venus. Alan thought this was unlikely and relocated the action to London in 2010.
- In later revisions of the play, the setting was moved to 1997.
- Standing Room Only was the first Ayckbourn play to be directed by the author himself. Although the original production in Scarborough had been directed by Stephen Joseph, when the play was revived at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, in 1963, Alan directed the play himself.
- It was the first Ayckbourn play to be optioned for a West End production. Peter Bridge, who would later produce Relatively Speaking in the West End, bought the rights to the play, but it was never produced.
- Standing Room Only was also the first Ayckbourn play to be bought for television. In 1963, the popular ITV series Armchair Theatre purchased rights to the play but it was never produced.
- The play was partly inspired by Alan Ayckbourn's love of science / speculative fiction writing when he was growing up and is the first of his plays written in the science fiction genre.
- Standing Room Only has never been published, nor is it available to produce. Original manuscripts are held in the British Library and the Ayckbourn Archive at the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York.