Mr Whatnot: Facts
Mr Whatnot
Play Number: 6World Premiere: 12 November 1963
Venue: Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent
Premiere Staging: In-the-round
Published: Samuel French
Other Media: No
Cast: 4m / 3f
Run Time: 2hrs
Synopsis: A silent piano tuner's visit to a country house turns into an extraordinary and surrealistic adventure as he falls in love with a soon-to-be-married aristocratic young woman.
- Mr Whatnot is Alan Ayckbourn's 6th play.
- The world premiere - directed by Alan Ayckbourn - opened at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, on 12 November 1963.
- The London premiere - directed by Warren Jenkins - opened at the New Arts Theatre on 6 August 1964.
- It is one of only six full-length plays by Alan Ayckbourn which have not received their world premiere in Scarborough. The others being Christmas V Mastermind (1962), Jeeves (1975), A Small Family Business (1987), All Lies (2021) and Welcome To The Family (2002).
- The play was in part inspired by Alan Ayckbourn's love of film, particularly the work of the director René Clair and the actor Buster Keaton.
- It was the first Ayckbourn play to have a West End transfer, opening at the New Arts Theatre on 6 August 1964.
- The popular comedian Ronnie Barker starred in the London production as Lord Slingsby Craddock and based his television creation Lord Rustless on the character (and for which Alan Ayckbourn wrote sketches under a pseudonym for the TV show Hark At Barker).
- This production was also the shortest run of any Ayckbourn play in the West End, closing on 22 August 1964; little more than two weeks after it opened.
- In 1968, Alan Ayckbourn directed an amateur production of the play for Leeds Art Theatre. It starred the then unknown actor Bob Peck.
- It was the first play to be staged at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round, Scarborough, when Alan moved the company to its new home from the Library Theatre in 1976.
- Mr Whatnot was published by Samuel French in 1992. It is the earliest of Alan Ayckbourn's plays to have been published and is also the earliest of his plays available to produce.