Background
Ayckbourn wrote Sugar Daddies in early 2003, shortly after concluding his family play The Jollies and shortly before starting rehearsals for Tim Firth's The Safari Party. In some respects, it can be considered a follow-on from the Damsels in Distress trilogy. It again features a young female leading character in some kind of danger, and shares the theme of East End crime that frequently arose throughout the trilogy. The original productions also shared Alison Pargeter as one of the leading roles, but this had influence far beyond making Sugar Daddies a companion piece.
Prior to acting at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Alison Pargeter had concentrated her career on playing children and teenagers. Indeed, her first role working with Ayckbourn was as a nine-year-old girl in his new family musical Whenever in 2000. The following year, she played a 16-year-old in GamePlan, the older heroine in FlatSpin, and, finally, an ex-lapdancer in RolePlay - three roles that earned her Best Newcomer in the Critics' Circle Awards. Having seen her take on the different range of ages successfully, Ayckbourn chose to write a role specifically combining all of her traits into one character. Although Ayckbourn has previously written plays with a specific set of actors in mind (the most recent example being RolePlay, written during rehearsals for two of the Damsels in Distress plays), the practice of writing for a specific actor was very unusual, and this play is regarded as the closest Ayckbourn has come to creating a role for an individual.
The role chosen for Sasha, Alison Pargeter's character, concentrated heavily on the theme of self-delusion. Ayckbourn equated it to French dramatist Jean Anouilh's theme of innocence being gradually corrupted. To some extent, the same theme of deception and self-deception applies to the other four characters, particularly Val, the old man Sasha befriends, whose dark past he is unable to hide for long.
Read more about this topic: Sugar Daddies (play)
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