"It's about where you draw the line. People steal paper clips in the office without thinking about it. They cheat with their fares on the bus. So I explore a family that shifts imperceptively from this to being involved in drugs. I suppose I'm moving into morality plays."
(Sunday Tribune, 17 August 1986)

"It's unheard of. I finished it in April and I had to submit it to Sir Peter Hall. That was a unique feeling. I have been submitting plays to myself for years and accepting them without a qualm. I was extremely nervous. Of course some people would say it should happen more often. Now I've cast it and it's sitting in a drawer while I sit here twitching, wondering whether I'll still like it when next April comes and we start rehearsing it. I hope to God I do."
(Sydney Morning Herald, 14 September 1986)

"When Peter Hall asked me to write for the Olivier it was the first time I had come up against a request to write for any theatre other than Scarborough. My usual way of writing there is to take a month off (three weeks worrying about the play and one week actually writing it) then we go straight into rehearsal. For the NT, I had to write it much earlier, the deadline being last October. As it turned out I could not leave it that late because by then I was to be in rehearsal for Tons of Money. In fact I finished it in the Spring last year and it's the first time I've written a play that has been on hold for a year....
"It's [about] a family furniture business. I got interested in people's notions of honesty - what they consider to be honest and dishonest. We all have some measure of deviousness - does it really matter that we take home a few paper clips? that sort of thing. I wanted to take the audience by the hand and lead them to somewhere where they did not know they were going. In the play, I'm trying to say 'Let me take you on a journey and lets see how far we can go'. It's about a man who takes on the responsibility for this small family business who says `lets make an honest business of it - the bosses won't fiddle the expenses and everybody will be absolutely honest and open. When this idea breaks down, the big question raised is `how is it possible to remain honest in a society like ours today? Are there not too many pressures for people to withstand the feeling `well, look, everybody else is doing it, everybody else is fiddling their income tax and the free bus ride so why shouldn't I? The play takes you through every crime you could mention so that the characters ask themselves how on earth they get to the point that they do. A Small Family Business is a fairly black comedy that lands up in an area of dead bodies and drug smuggling."
(Plays International, February 1987)

"[It's] Middle-weight. Yes. I don't think I ever write, or want to write, really heavy-weight pieces. But some of my plays are obviously more substantial than others, and built on a larger scale. Writing with the Olivier in mind, I had my mind set on the scale and the sort of subject necessary to sustain it, and I came up with the idea of a "modern morality play". My son had been studying catering, and he was telling me about all the tricks of accounting, what you regularly have to write off every day. And there I was feeling like a complete idiot, asking all those old fuddy-duddy questions like "You mean they steal food from the kitchens? Why don't they stop them? Why don't they pay them more, and then dismiss them if they are caught doing anything dishonest?" And so I decided to write this morality about a man who decides to run his family business on lines of absolute honesty, paying people what they deserve and then expecting them to take not so much as a paper-clip, being absolutely straight with the tax people and so on. Of course it is a sort of tragedy. First one of his family gets into trouble, and, his duties as a father coming first, he has to bend the rules a little bit. And once he has started, one thing leads inevitably to another, until by the end he is involved in heavy drug-smuggling, the works. And all through this, we have to sympathise with him and condone what he is doing every step of the way.
"What the play's really about is the virtual non-existence of set moral codes any more, and the fallacy of trying to live by one. I think now the only thing we can do - and in a way cannot help doing - is to make up our own moral codes as we go along, following out our feelings that "I would do this, but I would draw the line at that". The conclusion the play leads to, I might say, is the purely practical one of "You can take the paper-clips, but draw the line at the desk." I suppose that's why, in the end, it's a comedy, not a tragedy. I suppose that's why all my plays are."
(Plays And Players, April 1987)

"It's the first time anyone has died in a play of mine. It's a fairly dark theme - honesty. It was sparked by the fact that everyone has their own idea of what honesty is."
(Sunday Express, 24 May 1987)

"I am quite a moral writer, in a funny way, and I do think that if one looks at my plays, a lot of people who sow do reap by the end. I don t say that all the good people go to heaven and all the bad people don't, because I don't think that really happens. Would that it did. I do think that we do share an awful lot of responsibility - much more responsibility for each other perhaps than we're prepared even nowadays (and particularly nowadays perhaps) to recognise. And I think there is an awful feeling of let them be, it doesn't matter to me."
(Kalideoscope, 8 June 1987)

"I start with a theme and the theme in my new play, A Small Family Business, is honesty. It's about an honest man and his relationships in a dishonest society. I've often thought, for example, that if Jesus Christ came back and arrived in the City of London and spoke only the truth, he would probably be regarded as the greatest con man who ever lived."
(Alan Ayckbourn, 1987)

"I came up with a A Small Family Business. With its doll's house set on two floors, it was really the first play I had written that could not be staged in the round at Scarborough. It is what I term a light heavyweight piece. In the Olivier it is difficult to do ethereal plays with delicate messages conveyed by eyebrows; I think you need something with a bit of clout. It was good, as I started to build the company, to bring in actors who had worked with me over the years in Scarborough, many of whom had worked for so long and so hard up there for so little, but all of whom understood and supported the company system. A critic said recently that the acting team seem to bat all the way to number eleven. We also bowl a bit, too."
(Sunday Telegraph, 21 February 1988)

"We were into previews of A Small Family Business before the next disaster occurred. We were doing some tidying-up sort of rehearsals one afternoon. Gerald Scarfe was sitting in the stalls sketching away, bringing out the less fortunate features of Michael Gambon and myself, when Michael tripped on a backstage cable, severely damaging his ankle. Being the man he is, we stood around for some moments enjoying this latest example of his sense of humour. A few seconds later we realised how serious the injury was. He insisted on playing that night, a sort of one-legged, hopping performance. We watched in horror as he turned grey and then yellow with pain. On the following night he was back again, expecting to play. By now, the pain of walking was so intense that it was actually difficult to make out what he was saying. Blessedly, he agreed to go home. I sought out the understudy, Allan Mitchell, to inform him that he was to take on Gambon's huge role that night. I found him running his lines, appropriately, in the NT's quiet room, an area generally reserved for meditation and prayer. Mitchell took over brilliantly, but the official opening was delayed until Gambon's return."
(Sunday Telegraph, 21 February 1988)

"I wrote A Small Family Business a year ahead, knowing I couldn't do my usual last-minute capers in the National Theatre, a user-unfriendly building, with five floors of scattered dressing rooms with no names on the doors, hundreds of people the actors don't know. I came to it fresh and followed the author's directions - and it was wonderful! We blocked the play and found all the directions worked. I can't remember why I did half of them. The actors assumed it would, but it was satisfying for me. It was a good decision I made, to go to the National for that two years, because it made me write for that big auditorium and somehow try and lick the brute; it's a beautiful auditorium for big classic drama. I always wanted to write the occasional big, robust vehicle."
(The Stage, 25 August 1988)

"People have different ideas about what it is right to steal from other people. For instance, some people consider it is morally justifiable to steal books because they contain ideas which should be available to everyone. People can be very reasonable about it but it's so dangerous. Where do you draw the line? One evening at the National Theatre someone was giving a lecture on the play which I didn't know was going to happen. He said it contained all seven Deadly Sins, and it's quite true. I think my plays have become a little more fantastic."
(Birmingham Post, 26 August 1989)

"It {the play] might have been written in a lighter moment by Sarah Kane."
(The Guardian, 5 August 2000)

"This certainly was a breakthrough – finishing a play nearly a year before the first rehearsal instead of the usual day before. I took advantage of being away from Scarborough by writing for a large cast and setting the piece in a two storey house with six rooms – like a giant doll’s house. Something we could never have achieved in our tiny Scarborough space. At the National Theatre during the opening minutes, the laughter used to roll round that huge Olivier auditorium like shock waves of thunder. Very satisfying."
(‘Ayckbourn At 50’ souvenir programme)

Copyright: Alan Ayckbourn