The British sex farces are the thing
Comedic trilogy also a scathing attack on society and marriage
You’d be forgiven for suspecting British playwright Alan Ayckbourn is a closet sadist.
Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests, the farcical comedic trilogy that opens the new season at The Gladstone starting Aug. 28, requires the same six actors to play the same six characters in three different, full-length plays that share the same, overlapping plot set in a country house on one summer weekend.
As if that’s not sufficiently daunting for all involved, the three shows — Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden — will, in a variation on their usual brutal scheduling, each open two weeks apart at The Gladstone, then run in repertory at the beginning of October with each show getting two performances per week, and finally all be presented on Oct. 10.
“It’s a huge bloody challenge to get this thing to work,” says John P. Kelly, who’s directing the Gladstone shows. The shows are a presentation of Plosive Productions and Kelly’s own company, SevenThirty Productions which is celebrating its 10th anniversary.
On the plus side, says Kelly, because the characters are the same in all three plays, “by the time you get to the third play, you don’t have to do much character development.”
The trilogy is about a dysfunctional family who gather over a weekend. Things get complicated thanks to sex (Norman is a man of conquests), boredom, anger, and other age-old human wants and failings. The action, as suggested by the titles of the three plays, takes place in a different part of the house each day: the dining room, the living room, the garden.
While normally billed as a comedy, the 1973 trilogy isn’t really that at all, according to Kelly, who has directed other Ayckbourn shows at The Gladstone including a splendid How the Other Half Loves. Despite being funny, “These plays are scathing attacks on the middle class … on modern society and marriage,” he says. “They ask serious questions about relationships and commitment. Like a Neil Simon play, they make you wince at the same time you laugh.
“I’m guessing the author is saying, ‘This is a satire on British society of the ’70s, and if (audiences) get too involved in who goes in this door or out that one, they are missing the point.’ ”
The Norman Conquests is a perennially popular work by the prolific Ayckbourn. Now 76 years old, the London native has written 79 plays. Many, including Sisterly Feelings and Absurd Person Singular, have been produced in London’s West End, at the Royal National Theatre and elsewhere, including Broadway. His plays have been translated into dozens of languages and won multiple awards including an Olivier and a Tony.
Not all have been successful. Jeeves, a musical co-written with Andrew Lloyd Webber and based on the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, was a storied flop. However, so much of his canon has remained in repertory that lighthearted speculation continues about whether Ayckbourn or Shakespeare is the most-produced playwright in the U.K. each year.
Ayckbourn, known as a private man whose public honours include a knighthood, not only writes quickly but reportedly doesn’t bother with rewrites, Kelly says.
If that rewrite business is true, it may be as much a result of his extensive directing experience as it is the result of his skill as a writer. He has directed in London’s West End, at the Royal National Theatre and elsewhere. For 37 years he was the artistic director of the regional Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England, where he also directed and where all but four of his own plays premièred.
This summer he returned to the Stephen Joseph Theatre to direct a revival of his own Confusions to help celebrate the theatre’s 60th anniversary.
All that directing may mean that, more than most playwrights, he instinctively knows what will work onstage and what won’t, thereby making his writing process more efficient.
His directing also gives insight into a man whose plays can bite. In an email, Ayckbourn’s archivist, Simon Murgatroyd, says that during rehearsals, “Alan is quite hands off, gently guiding the actors to where he wants them to go. He’s fond of telling anecdotes, which actually are generally him guiding the actors in the right direction without necessarily telling them directly.”
Murgatroyd says Ayckbourn’s great contribution to Englishspeaking theatre has been his championing of regional theatre. He’s lived most of his life in the seaside resort of Scarborough, encouraging and developing new writers, actors and others during his decades at the Stephen Joseph Theatre.
For Kelly, Ayckbourn’s legacy will be the “respect and stature” he’s given to British farce. “He brought it to a level it had never been before.”