Drowning on Dry Land (play)
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| Written by | Alan Ayckbourn | ||
| Characters | Charlie Conrad Linzi Ellison Jason Ratcliffe Hugo de Préscourt Gale Gilchrist Marsha Bates Simeon Diggs |
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| Date premiered | 4 May 2004 | ||
| Place premiered | Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough | ||
| Original language | English | ||
| Subject | Celebrity culture | ||
| Genre | Comedy | ||
| Setting | Grounds of Charlie Conrad's house | ||
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Drowning on Dry Land is a 2004 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, his 66th to be produced. Exploring the culture of B-list celebrities, it is a comedy about the rise and fall of Charlie Conrad, a man apparently famous for being a failure.
Alan Ayckbourn's previous play about the celebrity culture was Man of the Moment, with one of the main characters a megastar, even though the publicity that triggered his celebrity career was his involvement in a horrific bank robbery.
In the few years before Drowning on Dry Land was written, celebrity culture (propagated by a deluge of tabloid images and celebrity magazine gossip, and helped along by the emergence of reality TV shows such as Big Brother) rose to a point where people were becoming famous for no particular reason at all. As Dame Edna Everage once remarked: "celebrity is the new nonentity".
The incident that led to the inspiration for the play was a moment in the 2003 Piers Morgan documentary The Importance of Being Famous where a young girl jumps up and down in a field for several minutes, then asks "Am I famous yet?" This quote was originally intended as the title of the play. However, after looking through a dictionary of quotations, he came across an old English proverb, "It is folly to drown on dry land". The title was changed accordingly, and a similar line was included towards the end of the play.
By a fortunate coincidence (from the play's point of view), two tabloid stories were featuring in the celebrity news during the launch of the play: David Beckham's affair with Rebecca Loos and Leslie Grantham's antics in front of a webcam, thus helping to publicise the production.
Several of Ayckbourn's observations about celebrity culture have obvious influences in the play. One notable quote was his opinion that a dangerous mistake celebrities can make is to believe all the good things said about them, both in publicity and what other people (particularly agents) say. He also suggested that in an age of increasing anonymity, some are increasingly desperate to be noticed. The play also follows the theory that when one quickly rises to the top, one can fall just as quickly and mercilessly.
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