SOURCE: A review of Time of My Life, in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4715, August 13, 1993, p. 17.

In the following review, O’Connor describes Ayckbourn's Time of My Life as a horror story filled with symbolism.

Alan Ayckbourn's forty-fourth play, Time of My Life, is a horror story, set in “Calvinu's restaurant—Time: past, present and future”. The Stratton family—parents, two sons, daughter-in-law and the younger's son's new girl-friend—are gathered to celebrate mother's birthday. During the course of the evening a table on either side of the stage, the centre of which is occupied by the family banquet, shows the progress of the elder son and his estranged wife in the future, and on the opposite side, in the past, the doomed courtship of the younger son and his date, Maureen (Sophie Heyman), a punk hair-dresser from the wrong end of town. During the second scene, early in...