Sisterly Feelings: In Brief
Sisterly Feelings
Play Number: 23World Premiere: 10 January 1979
Venue: Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round, Scarborough
Premiere Staging: Three-sided
Published: Samuel French
Other Media: No
Cast: 7m / 4f
Run Time: To be confirmed
Synopsis: The first of Alan Ayckbourn's 'chance' plays. It follows the choices two sisters make over the course of several months and how it affects their lives and relationships.
Note: Sisterly Feelings is one of Alan Ayckbourn's 'chance' plays where a random element influences the course of the action. In this case, the decision of which second scene to perform is decided by a coin-flip and the third scene is an arbitrary choice by an actor.
- Sisterly Feelings is Alan Ayckbourn's 23rd play.
- The world premiere - directed by Alan Ayckbourn - was held at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough, on 10 January 1979.
- The London premiere - directed by Alan Ayckbourn - took place in The Olivier at the National Theatre on 3 & 4 June 1980. The premiere took place over two nights as each of the two major permutations of the play (Abigail & Dorcas) were presented during separate performances.
- The play originally went through several titles changes before arriving at Sisterly Feelings; notes held in archive suggest other options included Like A Sister, As A Sister and Sisterly Touches.
- It is the first of Alan Ayckbourn's 'chance' plays; plays which have a random element in them. Other 'chance' plays include It Could Be Any One Of Us, Roundelay and Mr A's Amazing Maze Plays. Intimate Exchanges is often incorrectly assumed to be a 'chance' play, but although it deals with choice and has 16 different permutations depending on decisions made within the play, the choices are not made live and are pre-determined before performance.
- Alan Ayckbourn apparently had the idea for a play which involved different choices within its structure as early as 1973 when he was writing The Norman Conquests.
- No matter what choices are made during Sisterly Feelings, the play always ends with the same final scene. However, this scene was written by Alan Ayckbourn with a degree of ambiguity so that it can be interpreted in different ways to reflect the decisions made during the play.
- Sisterly Feelings is one of Alan Ayckbourn's plays set in his fictional town of Pendon. Other notable Pendon-set plays include Relatively Speaking, Time And Time Again, A Chorus Of Disapproval and Improbable Fiction.
- Despite there being four possible permutations of the play, only two of them are named - Abigail & Dorcas - and which are generally considered the fixed variants of the play if performed without the chance elements.
- It was the first Ayckbourn play to be produced in The Olivier auditorium at the National Theatre and only the second Ayckbourn play at the venue after Bedroom Farce. Part of the reason for Sisterly Feelings being set outdoors on Pendon Common was to solve the challenge of filling the vast Olivier space.
- Although published as a play text by Samuel French, Sisterly Feelings was also published in the collections Sisterly Feelings & Taking Steps (Chatto & Windus) and Joking Apart & Other Plays (Penguin)