in 1987 and was knighted in the 1997 New Year Honours. It is frequently claimed (but not proved) that Alan Ayckbourn is the most performed living English playwright, and the second most performed of all time, after Shakespeare. Although Ayckbourn's plays no longer dominate the theatrical scene on the scale of his earlier works, he continues to write. Among major success has been Private Fears in Public Places, which had a hugely successful Off-Broadway run at 59E59 Theaters and, in 2006, was made into a film, Cœurs, directed by Alain Resnais. After Ayckbourn suffered a stroke, there was uncertainty as to whether he could continue to write. The play that premiered immediately after his stroke, If I Were You, had been written before his illness; the first play written afterwards, Life and Beth, premiered in the summer of 2008. Ayckbourn continues to write for the Stephen Joseph Theatre on the invitation of his successor as artistic director, Chris Monks. The first new play under this arrangement, My Wonderful Day, was performed in October 2009. Ayckbourn continues to experiment with theatrical form. The play Roundelay opened in September 2014; before each performance, members of the audience are invited to extract five coloured ping pong balls from a bag, leaving the order in which each of the five acts is played left to chance, and allowing 120 possible permutations. In Arrivals and Departures (2013), the first half of the play is told from the point of view of one character, only for the second half to dramatise the same events from the point of view of another. Many of Ayckbourn's plays, including Private Fears in Public Places, Intimate Exchanges, My Wonderful Day and Neighbourhood Watch, have had their New York premiere at 59E59 Theaters as part of the annual Brits Off Broadway Festival. In 2019, Ayckbourn had published his first novel, The Divide, which had previously been showcased during a reading at the Stephen Joseph Theatre. As a consequence of the Covid lockdown, Ayckbourn's 2020 play, Anno Domino, was recorded as a radio production, with Ayckbourn and his wife Heather playing all the roles. Similarly, Ayckbourn's Covid-period 2021 play, The Girl Next Door, was streamed online and made available behind a paywall on the Stephen Joseph Theatre's website. In 2022, the first Ayckbourn play in around 60 years premiered in a venue other than Scarborough: All Lies at the Old Laundry in