Award-winning playwright and director Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s Communicating Doors will be performed on the same stage where he played out his early career.

Sir Alan said he was “delighted" that the theatre has "new life breathed in to it” by Leatherhead Rep, who will be staging Communicating Doors as one of three plays in the season.

He worked at Leatherhead Theatre under the directorship of the theatre’s founder, Hazel Vincent Wallace OBE.

“Hazel took me under her wing bringing me to the old theatre and - along with a welter of ASM-ing work - gave me a swathe of acting opportunities in the whirlwind of weekly rep," said Sir Alan.

"With her general manager, Michael Marriott, she gave me continuous employment for several important formative months of my fledgling career.”

Sir Alan applauded Leatherhead Rep’s efforts to restore the rep system to the UK theatre industry and remembers this unique way of working with amusement.

“Those were the times when practically everyone working in the building, given the challenge of an occasional larger-cast production, got in on the act," he said.

"‘Very difficult to concentrate’ sniffed one ‘proper’ actor, ‘when during my big speech, one of them’s checking the lights and the other’s counting the bloody house!’”

Communicating Doors is set in a near-dystopian future and tells the story of a dominatrix fleeing for her life through a hotel communicating door, only to find herself 20 years in the past.

Stalked by a psychopath in the present and the past, the opportunity to alter time for the better puts the lives of three women at stake.

The play will run at the Leatherhead Theatre from Tuesday, May 1 to Saturday, May 5, closing the season that begins on April 17 with Yes, Prime Minister followed by The Secret Garden.

Tickets are available from the Leatherhead Theatre box office, by phone 01372 365141, or via the website www.theleatherheadtheatre.com