The Norman Conquests

It is now possible to look at Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests – an interlocking trilogy of plays set simultaneously over the same weekend in different locations (dining-room, sitting-room and garden) of a modest Victorian house in the Sussex countryside – and proclaim a comic masterpiece of the late twentieth century.

And in presenting them in the round – in an astonishing transformation of the Old Vic which builds the stalls up to stage level and creates a complimentary circle behind the action without defacing the peculiar properties of the original auditorium (in fact, enhancing them) – Kevin Spacey and the show’s director and designer Matthew Warchus and Rob Howell have honoured Ayckbourn’s creative roots in Scarborough in a way no West End revival of any of his plays has ever done.

I have not seen the trilogy since Eric Thompson’s production at the Globe (now the Gielgud) thirty-five years ago, and comparisons are odorous. Whereas Tom Courtenay was an ethereal, oddly messianic Norman, the libidinous assistant librarian who sets out to seduce both his sister-in-laws and even his own myopic wife while getting plastered on parsnip wine, Stephen Mangan’s Norman, earthier and more thumpingly physical, is an almost tragic emotional misfit in a household of suburban suffocation.

An unseen, bedbound, tyrannical old mother has trapped unmarried Annie (Jessica Hynes) as her rumpled, baggy-trousered carer. Brother Reg (Paul Ritter) and his beady-eyed bossy-boots wife Sarah (Amanda Root is a pocket nightmare version of the Penelope Keith template snob matriarch) have arrived to giver her a break, an unlikely putative escapade to East Grinstead with the Norman whose wife Ruth (Amelia Bullmore) comes charging on to the scene to make matters much worse.

There’s an odd theory that Ayckbourn’s plays got bleaker with time. But his comedy was tinged with cold grey from the start, and the scathing irruption of marital bickering and name-calling we get in the famous dinner scene makes Strindberg look quite a jolly fellow. Annie and the slow-witted neighbourly vet Tom (beautifully played by Ben Miles as a kindly do-gooder whose ministrations lacerate where they should smooth over) play two delicately paced scenes of Chekhovian tenderness and emptiness.

Ayckbourn wrote the plays – Table Manners, Living Together and Round and Round the Garden – laterally, ie across the three locations and forward in simultaneous chronology. It is an amazing feat of reverberative, deepening construction never matched in any of his subsequent plays, and Warchus and his actors pay due respect to this achievement in the subtlety and careful playing of these richly rewarding and heart-breakingly recognisable characters. Undoubtedly one of the year’s highlights, an unforgettable experience.

– Michael Coveney