My Sister Sadie: Quotes by Alan Ayckbourn

"My Sister Sadie is a play for children, but I've also tried to make it fun for all the family. It's about a boy growing up with his mother in a remote part of the English countryside. His sister had drowned, and when a helicopter crashes nearby, and his mother discovers a young girl has survived and decides it is a way of making up for her lost daughter. So she brings up Sadie as her own. But it all gets a bit sinister when government agents start tracking Sadie down. Without giving too much away, there's more to her than meets the eye. The trick with writing for children is understanding they like a very strong plot, and for a story to he quite scary. When you look at all the great children's writers, from Roald Dahl to Philip Pullman, there's always a dark element."
(Hull Daily Mail, 4 December 2003)

"It's probably the darkest, thematically, of the plays I've written for children. Looking at it in rehearsals, I said to the cast: I hope this is going to work - I'm not usually as blunt as that - but I just don't know, we are playing this at a level that requires quite a lot of concentration. And in one sense it is. I think you've noticed before that a lot of my children's plays are directly related to an equivalent adult play.
Invisible Friends - Woman in Mind. A girl who dreams up her own family. My Sister Sadie is undoubtedly Comic Potential revisited for children. But it deals in a completely different way. But quite often I revisit the themes, because I'm quite interested in re-exploring them for a young audience. Or not even a young audience, but for a family audience…. It was written around the beginning of the year [2003]. There was a lot going on then, the Iraq war, weapons of mass destruction. This has, thematically, been woven in, not enough to give the children nightmares, but it's there. But in the end it is sort of a traditional tale, I suppose, of 'good' and 'evil'. How 'good' can triumph."
(A Guided Tour Through Ayckbourn Country)

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