Improbable Fiction – 11th to 18th June 2022

Comment from a first-night audience member: “As usual, the actors/ actresses were entertaining and we giggled along with the rest of the audience !”

The play takes its title from a line in that play of reversals and wish fulfilment, Twelfth Night.  In Improbable Fiction, Ayckbourn has devised a plot as insanely topsy-turvy as Shakespeare’s.

Improbable Fiction is Alan Ayckbourn’s 69th play, wherein everyone in the Pendon Writers’ Circle, a self-help group for the creatively stalled and artistically deluded, is having collective writers’ block. However, the presence of a rather ordinary young girl unleashes their imaginations – with surprising results!

Improbable Fiction sends up Dorothy L Sayers, Jane Austen and The X-Files – with a selection of spoof sci-fi characters, a detective that any crime writer would be proud to disown, a damsel in distress, and the abduction of his mother by aliens, the story lines overlap and interweave around a bemused Arnold.