Invisible Friends
Invisible Friends is a 1989 children's play by the British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. It was written as a starring vehicle for actress Emma Chambers who portrayed the central character of teenager Lucy Baines in the original production at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, England for its run in late 1989 and early 1990. In Ayckbourn's wider ouvre of plays, Invisible Friends can be seen as having similarities to The Boy who Fell into a Book (1998) (which also deals with childhood dreams and nightmares), and in theme, the plays for adults Woman in Mind (1989) and Wildest Dreams (1991). Both works where an imagined fantasy goes too far for the characters. Invisible Friends is most often seen as a companion play to specifically Woman in Mind. In both cases, they show the dangers of living your fantasy life at the expense of your real life and how you can get into some sort of trouble by confusing the two. In Lucy's tale, it became a moral fable about trying to love the people you live with, rather than the people you invent. Ayckbourn said of writing Invisible Friends:There is a joke, which I think I may have started, that I'm rewriting all my adult plays for kids. This is gentler (...) I'm also trying to retain as much as possible the colours that I put into the adult plays. (...) I would like them to laugh, of course, and to be excited, and to be afraid, but not so they can't sleep. My ulterior motive is to excite the children into coming back when they're 25, so we haven't got another lost generation saying: 'the theatre is something I don't understand.'"
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