ALAN Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business had never been performed on a Yorkshire stage. Ian Brown, artistic director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, had never directed an Ayckbourn play.

Now two birds have been killed with one stone: Brown's production of Ayckbourn's 1987 play of escalating wrongdoing is up and running at the Leeds theatre until July 12.

Traditionally, Ayckbourn premieres his plays at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where he is artistic director. However, he wrote A Small Family Business during his two years at the National Theatre, upon accepting Peter Hall's invitation to run his own company, choose his own programme and direct in all three auditoria there.

Ayckbourn took advantage of a break from writing for the circular structure of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round to create a play multi-tiered in every way with 17 characters and a complex set, designed specifically for the Olivier Theatre stage.

"This play doesn't really suit in-the-round staging," says Ian, with amused understatement. "It takes place in six rooms, with a ground floor and a first floor. That's pretty hard in-the-round, and pretty hard actually even in our Quarry Theatre.

"You're required to put a house on stage like a doll's house where you can see into all the rooms with simultaneous action in the rooms, and that means the play can be in three houses at once. That's part of the fun: things happening in three different spaces and yet on one stage, and there's something delicious about that.

"It enables Alan to tell the story very quickly as you're jumping from one place to another without waiting for scenery changes. So it's quite 'televisual' in a way and I find that works well on stage."

Ian is enjoying his first encounter with an Ayckbourn play.

"There was a time when I was starting out as a director where every theatre seemed to be doing an Ayckbourn, and I think Alan would agree that in the Seventies and Eighties, there were a lot of terrible productions that saw him as two-dimensional, and yet I think his great plays, of which there are many, are three-dimensional.

"There was this snobbish attitude that they were just standard fare, but now they are being taken more seriously again. I'm treating A Small Family Business as seriously as possible, like an Ibsen or Chekhov play."

For tickets, ring 0113 213 7700.

Updated: 11:35 Friday, June 13, 2003