THE NORMAN CONQUESTS. To 20 December.

London.

THE NORMAN CONQUESTS
by Alan Ayckbourn.

Table Manners Living Together Round and Round the Garden

Old Vic In rep to 20 December 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 3pm
Trilogy Days (at 11am, 3pm, 7.30pm, various orders) 18 Oct 1, 22 Nov, 6, 20 Dec.
Runs: Table Manners 2hr 30min.
Living Together 2hr 15min.
Round and Round the Garden 2hr 20min One interval each.

TICKETS: 0870 060 6628.
www.oldvictheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 October.

Triumph of Chekhov for holidaymakers.
No-one directs Alan Ayckbourn like Alan Ayckbourn. For once that’s a good thing. For, in his own way, wunderkind director Matthew Warchus has produced an apotheosis of Ayckbourn’s early trio of interlinked comedies, showing family tensions as they occur over a weekend in the dining-room, living-room and garden of a rambling manor-house in South East England where Ayckbourn, long-stationed in Scarborough, has generally located his plays.

“Nothing more than a light-hearted seaside comedy,” said The Guardian in a review of Make Yourself at Home (as Living Together was known at its 1973 debut). The trilogy’s ingenuity was also widely commented upon. But Ayckbourn’s since gone beyond this crafty interlocking of events, in many ways, noticeably the real-time House and Garden, where actors scurry between simultaneous performances of two plays in adjacent auditoria.

Seaside lightness was long a factor with Ayckbourn. What Warchus and his magnificent cast do, par excellence and more intensely than any other production, is show how the surface comedy is part of a rich fabric of hope and despair. A Chekhovian richness, in fact, that never undermines its characters for the sake of a theatrical effect. What Chekhov, author of short farces as well as the famous comedies and drama, might have produced if he’d been writing to entertain holidaymakers in the Crime

They are very funny, quite often hilarious; to get a show-stopping joke out of a waste-paper basket in not one but two plays is an achievement. Deck chairs and other objects are also called into play for laughter. Yet this is never despite, or reductive of, the characters.

The Conquests are also a fine picture of their times, like so much of Ayckbourn’s work, which is constantly aware of what its audiences bring to the stage action. Assistant Librarian Norman, who Stephen Mangan in his knitted hat makes resemble a garden gnome, and Annie, looking after an incapacitated and once libidinous mother while frustratedly waiting for neighbouring vet, and monument to indecision, Tom to pop the question are characters who could only mooch around life in the post-sixties lull.

Sarah, however, married into the family like Norman’s wife Ruth, is like someone waiting frustratedly for Margaret Thatcher to arrive on a purposeful blue charger. Her estate agent husband Reg is a picture of suppressed fury who might have cropped up in something by Mike Leigh.

That leaves Norman’s wife Ruth, called in for the second act of each piece, each time first seen alone, with a peering myopia that’s about the one thing no longer so funny as in the early seventies. Her practicality is half of the chalk-and-cheese sandwich of marriage with the ambling seducer who, like other causes of comedic disasters before, declares he only wants to make people (i.e. women) happy.

The Old Vic has undergone a temporary change into the CQS space in-the-round. And it is round, not square like Scarborough. Front rows of audience lap almost onto the action, and from various points in the stalls certainly there’s a high feeling of contact with the stage. Designer Rob Howell spells out the locale in a covering landscape for the plays’ environs, which rises to lift the lid on the characters and their behaviour.

Stephen Mangan is as good a Norman as I’ve seen, though at times he uses the vocal undercurrent so many have to try and force sympathy (has any Norman been so good as the role’s originator Christopher Godwin, an excellent actor and clearly a star among the seventies Scarborough players?). Amelia Bullmore keeps Ruth slightly apart, catching the brisk precision borne not only of a detachment her refusal to wear spectacles encourages, but of dealing with an errant, irresponsible husband.

Tom is a difficult role, being built out of one-joke indecision. In casting Ben Miles, Warchus has someone whose physique and facial features bespeak strength and determination, comically undermined by his weak voice and manner. The character’s easy tendency to become tedious is avoided by Miles and through other characters’ mockery of his inexpressiveness. Yet it comes as no surprise when Tom’s denounced, just once in the entire trilogy.

Jessica Hynes is a superb Annie, both in frumpy everyday clothes and when unbundling herself into a flowery dress. The patience demanded by her mother, and waiting for Tom to pop the appropriate question (it’s must be like waiting for Godot) mixes with a sense of life passing.

At times Paul Ritter’s Reg might seem a comic turn, but it becomes clear there is a jokiness not only derived from his work, but his attempt to keep moving nervily along his life’s tightrope without stopping to think and falling off. And when the gusts do get too much for him to stay balanced, he has the intensity of the joker who’s long suppressed a secret fury,

Sarah has often been played as emotionally repressed, but Amanda Root’s outstanding, performance greatly enriches the character. Someone wanting order, her succumbing to Norman’s appeal is the more appealing owing to Root’s refusal to play the character as any kind of cold ‘type’. Among all the good and fine performances, this is outstanding.

But then, so is the whole production, which refuses to accept these plays as anything less than major works. The use of silences – several prolonged enough to give the most ardent Pinterite pause for thought – is one sign of this. Sometimes they allow the audience to anticipate a comic response. At others, the comedy is unexpected. And occasionally, the gaps in speech open an abyss into depths of despondency.

Here is the humane comedy of human folly and fragility, mixed with the human tragedy of an existence that fails to match up to inner aspirations. It is, fully, richly, perhaps uniquely, Chekhovian comedy with the laughs.

Ruth: Amelia Bullmore.
Annie: Jessica Hynes.
Norman: Stephen Mangan.
Tom: Ben Miles.
Reg: Paul Ritter.
Sarah: Amanda Root.

Director: Matthew Warchus.
Designer: Rob Howell.
Lighting: David Howe.
Sound: Simon Baker for Autograph.
Music: Gary Yershon.

2008-10-29 14:09:42