A long haul – and an absolute treat
The Norman Conquests
This is undoubtedly heretical – and will probably get me burned at the stake – but does Alan Ayckbourn’s early masterpiece The
Norman Conquests (1973) actually need to be a full-blown trilogy of plays?
At Chichester, director Blanche Mcintyre has assembled a crack cast to give us six hours of domestic wrangling that’s by turns broadly entertaining and stealthily harrowing. This revival (presented in-the-round) represents a career triumph for her, and seals a successful opening season for Daniel Evans as the new artistic director here. Yet the unique selling point of Ayckbourn’s ingenious, jigsaw-like jamboree – each play giving us a different vantage on the fraught interactions between six characters in a country house over one weekend – is also logistically problematic for the audience: if you come back night after night, you might feel a bit of a mug.
In themselves, Table Manners (set in the dining room), Living Together (set in the sitting-room) and Round and
Round the Garden (self-explanatory), are pretty undemanding in terms of time (about two hours). You’re not sated until you’ve seen what happens in each location. Yet if you sign up to binge-watch them in one go, starting at 11am, that still entails a lot of milling around.
This isn’t a Shakespeare history cycle; although the writing is at once lush and neatly ordered (Sir Alan at his best), there’s still scope, I think, to prune and re-landscape so it’s viewable in a more compact form.
That reservation aside, it’s impossible to fault the ensemble effort, which brings Ayckbourn’s acutely observed if exaggerated account of male foibles, female frustrations and the zero-sum game of middle-class mores to squirm-making life. The tragicomic dynamic is of pent-up need, thwarted release and related derangement.
Coping too much alone with her sick (never seen) mother upstairs, Jemima Rooper’s resentful, dowdy Annie pines for her clueless neighbour, nice-but-dim vet Tom; realising she’s getting nowhere, she has taken the rash decision to go on a dirty weekend with her brother-in-law Norman, feckless husband of careerist Ruth. But the planned tryst is scuppered by the interference of the uptight Sarah, who has come with her reviled hubby, Annie’s terminally dull estate-agent brother Reg, to housesit.
Which leaves Norman in situ, a priapic intruder on a very unswinging Seventies scene that might be billed as “Sexlessness and the Settee”.
As played by rising star Trystan Gravelle, this bearded anti-hero achieves a Falstaffian magnificence. The Welsh actor’s accent lends his repartee a layer of seductive lyricism (“Look at me – a gigolo trapped in a haystack,” he quips, as he helps himself to breakfast, to withering silence from his in-laws). He’s a lovable reprobate: an essential if ineffectual rebellious counter to the conformity around him and, as he sees it, the anti-romantic streak in women’s lib.
All that numbing, emasculating social context is beautifully relayed – whether it’s Sarah Hadland, issuing strangulated squeaks of disapproval as the control-freakish Sarah, Jonathan Broadbent the essence of beige, as Reg, or John Hollingworth as the hapless Tom, hands forever on hips and mouth agape in asinine smiles.
Completing the sextet is Hattie Ladbury as Norman’s long-suffering, short-sighted, forthright wife Ruth who features in two of the funniest set pieces, one involving deckchairs, the other a chronic misunderstanding. I haven’t enjoyed an Ayckbourn so much in ages. The pity is that it takes such ages to set out its stall.