Whenever: Quotes by Alan Ayckbourn

"I like to do a children's play that ties in with my adult play, and I suppose there's also a bit of re-telling of Communicating Doors. Whenever has a slightly pessimistic view of a possible future, where we need to talk to each other more. In a way the play is a moral lesson about thinking about the future now and not leaving it till it's too late."
(Yorkshire Post, November 2000)

"She [Emily] makes a small 'feminist' journey. She grows up in the play: she becomes strong. At the end of the play she resists her cousin who bullies her. She's stronger, she's more independent and there's a bit at the end when her uncle says: "You can't help me with this, you're only a girl." Right at the end there, and you know she's going to go on and become Amelia Earhart or something. She's going to fly the first aeroplane!
"The story is, in fact, a kind of parallel to
The Wizard Of Oz. The tin-man is the android, the scarecrow is the air-raid warden and the lion is the yeti, of course, the strange creature that turns out to the human race when left to its own devices."
(Extract from Albert-Reiner Glaap's A Guided Tour Through Ayckbourn Country)

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