Miriam has cared for her father in the family home during his vituperative last years with the help of a creepily polite nurse, Alice. On Father's death, Miriam's older sister, handsome, divorced Annabel, comes home after over thirty years in Tasmania to find Daddy has left the bulk of his fortune to her. Alice complains to Annabel that Miriam has sacked her and is intent upon blackmail, having evidence, she says, that Miriam did away with the old man. Miriam and Annabel join forces against Alice and the blackmailer's body is soon hurtling down the well, but all does not end there.

Charlie Conrad is a celebrity. His talent? He hasn't got one; the nation took him to their hearts for very publicly being unable to do anything competently. One fateful day, however, Charlie meets Marsha, and his marriage and career go into freefall... Drowning on Dry Land examines the current obsession with celebrity for its own sake and chillingly but hilariously demonstrates how celebrities can be destroyed as quickly as they are made.

Justin and Julie-Ann, hopelessly mismatched in love, are about to introduce their respective parents to each other over dinner - Justin's upper-crust alcoholic mother from Surrey and Julie-Ann's bigoted Yorkshire father and prim mother. Into this doomed scenario drops, literally, via the balcony upstairs and the river, Paige Petite, a former lap-dancer with suicidal tendencies and her thick, gun-toting minder who is employed by her violent boyfriend...

Suzy's father took off in a balloon one day and has not come down since. When Neville, her dog, loses his bark, she is sure the mysterious Mr Acousticus has something to do with it. What happens when they search the house is up to the reader, due to the ingenious stagecraft of the author.

Teenage Sorrel fights to keep herself and her abandoned mother, once a dot.com businesswoman, financially afloat by setting up as a part-time hooker, advertising for clients on the Internet and persuading her tearful school chum to act as her maid. Just when you wonder what will happen in this terrible situation the play becomes a farce about body disposal, police questioning and media intrusion.

Time of My Life charts the decline and fall of a successful family business founded and nurtured by Gerry and Laura Stratton. It is Laura's fifty-fourth birthday and Gerry has organized a small family dinner at their favourite restaurant. Domestically, all seems well. Glyn, their eldest son, has patched up his marriage with Stephanie; younger son Adam has a new girlfriend and is deeply in love. But, as we suspect, all this is surface stuff. For, as their evening proceeds, the play reveals skeletons from the past and a spectre of the future.

Funny, gripping and wrenchingly truthful, these three blackly comic plays slice into the soul of suburbia. Couples - often mismatched, sometimes disorientated - dominate the action. The settings are simple - a kitchen, a bedroom, a party - all familiar terrains where husbands and wives meet, bewildered, puzzled and angry.

Plays One: A Chorus of DisapprovalA Small Family Business Henceforward...Man of the Moment Alan Ayckbourn introduces his first volume of collected work that contains his morality plays from the 1980s.

This children's play is both inventive and entertaining, ideal for use in schools for the Literacy Hour strand of primary teaching for Key Stage 2 - both to read aloud and perform.

From helpful hints on writing to tips on directing (working with actors and technicians, when to listen to the experts, how to cope with rehearsals), this book provides a complete primer to the art of playwriting.