York University buys Alan Ayckbourn archive

The collection - which contains thousands of items including original working manuscripts, plot diagrams and correspondence - will become part of the Samuel Storey Writing and Performance Collection at the university’s Borthwick Institute.

Sir Alan said: “The archive is really about the writing process.

“The old method was my wife, Heather, at an old typewriter with me dictating from my hand-written notes.

“I always like to go to bed with a tidy script and, in the old days, I would trawl back through several pages of typing and blot things out with Tipp-Ex or cover my scripts with arrows.

“I realised that what I was learning from others and from experience was valuable and I wanted to chronicle it.

“I hope the archive is an extension of this.

“I think the archive will be a fertile ground for ideas and inspire people to write.”

Sir Alan, who is one of the most celebrated and prolific British playwrights since the Second World War, has said the archive documents the development of his plays’ first productions and their subsequent runs elsewhere in the UK and abroad, as well as including many theatre reviews.

It includes working drafts, holograph manuscripts and revised typescripts, showing Sir Alan creating some of his well-known complex comic structures.

There are also notes on plots, diagrams of relationships between characters, sketches of stage settings, and positionings and movements of characters.

The archive also includes his correspondence with playwrights, actors, directors, producers, designers and agents.

The university said this “reads like a Who’s Who of theatre from the second half of the 20th century onwards”, with names like Peter Hall, Peggy Ramsay, Trevor Nunn, Stephen Sondheim, John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Alan Plater.

Mike Cordner, Ken Dixon professor of drama in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, said: “Sir Alan is a uniquely prolific, radically innovative, and supremely inventive dramatist.

“His work holds a special resonance for Yorkshire and it is entirely appropriate that the archive remains in the county where much of the work was produced.

“We are enormously proud that the University of York is to be the repository for this extraordinary collection, and that it will be available for use not only by the university community but the wider public.”

The £240,000 purchase has been funded with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the Samuel Storey Charitable Trust, the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of the National Libraries.

Fiona Spiers, head of the Heritage Lottery Fund, Yorkshire and Humber, said: “This is incredibly exciting news, both for the university and the public.”

The Ayckbourn Archive will be the focus of a major outreach programme, the university said.