Ayckbourn beats the block

Alan Ayckbourn has only once been stricken by writer’s block: 11 years ago, when he was in hospital recovering from a stroke. “For the first time since my teens, I realised I didn’t have a new play in my head,” he told Ben Lawrence in The Daily Telegraph. “It was an appalling moment.” But the muse swiftly returned and now Ayckbourn’s play count (82) surpasses his age (78). There have been some misses among the hits. His 1979 comedy Taking Steps brought the house down in his native Scarborough, but then stiffed in the West End. “It was done so badly,” he mourns. “The curtain came down in absolute silence and all I could hear was my wife crying.” The current fashion for casting famous screen actors in stage shows also worries him. “They bring their own fans who expect certain things,” he says. “You get an actor who thinks ‘Thank God I’ve finally got out of playing the doctor in Hollyoaks and can be the psychopath on stage.’ And that doesn’t please the fans when they see nice Doctor Williams slashing and cutting.” Tracey Emin has just got back from installing her most famous work, My Bed, at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate. The piece – featuring a squalid bed strewn with condoms, dirty knickers, used tampons and fag butts – dates from 1998, when Emin was the 34-year-old bad girl of Britart; but it gets tweaked every time she moves it. “Sometimes I take great pleasure in arranging it,” she told Rachel Campbell-johnston in The Times. “I waft around and enjoy the memories as I work. Sometimes I even get in and pull the sheets up round my neck while everyone else – they all have to wear gloves, only I can touch it – looks on anxiously.” But while she enjoys installing it, “nothing about that bed feels relevant to me now at all. I have changed so much,” she says. Since her mother died last year, Emin has been full of regrets about her past. “All that smoking and swearing and drinking. I’ve only got 30 years left, and so I wonder why did I spend so much time f***ing about, like the clever kid who just sits at the back of the class flicking paper.” What she wants now more than anything is love. “My real dream is that I might meet someone. It would be wonderful to be with someone and share my life. That sounds like such a simple thing. But I haven’t had it in years. And now I think it would be nice. Anyone, aged 35 to 65, male or female, any occupation – except perhaps an arms dealer. I am open to the world.”