The Norman Conquests
A trilogy of plays
by Alan Ayckbourn
Directed by Blanche McIntyre
Designed by Simon Higlett
Chichester Festival Theatre
Tuesday 17th October 2017
NOTE:
Though there are separate pages for each play on this blog, that’s for reference for someone searching. They all lead back to this one review of all of them.
CAST:
Jonathan Broadbent – Reg
Trystan Gravelle – Norman
Sarah Hadland – Sarah
John Hollingworth – Tom
Hattie Ladbury- Ruth
Jemima Rooper – Annie
OVERVIEW
These three linked plays are considered Ayckbourn’s first major claim to fame. He has said:
They got an inordinate amount of praise and I could see that from then on, I had nowhere to go but down … it was the first – and I suspect last – occasion when I finished two plays in the same night. I wrote them in a week.
The Norman Conquests were first performed in the round in Scarborough in 1973, and it is always insisted that they can be viewed in any order, as the action overlaps, and characters walk out of one play and reappear in another room in the parallel play.
The West End wanted to cherry pick just one of the plays on their first 1974 London appearance (and disagreed on which one), but Ayckbourn insisted on the lot. Having a cast which included Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon, Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith may have helped its reception. I’m not sure how many of the three I’ve seen before. We have several large boxes of programmes. Leafing through them is terrifying … so many plays of which I have no memory whatsoever, including a small stack by Ayckbourn. The only one of this set that I turned up was Table Manners by The Sherman Theatre Company, which states that it takes place in Wales rather than Sussex … it is a Cardiff company. It’s undated. I’d guess 1997.
Regular readers will know I am not an Ayckbourn fan, and I was persuaded by Chichester’s three in a day. Actually, I believe my issue is not so much Ayckbourn, as that many of his audience go to the theatre just once a year, and then they go to an Ayckbourn play. Railing against that mass popularity is pure theatre snob. Guilty. Sorry!
I have read that the three plays have a reverberation effect on each other, and that if you’ve seen only one, you haven’t got the full effect. For example, Jane Edwardes in The Sunday Times said:
The plays can be seen individually, but it is so much better to see them of a piece. The joy comes from piecing events together, and the growing realisation that each character is much more complicated than they first appear.
I also had a long discussion with an actor friend who said you need to see them in the original round, and Chichester have for the first time rejigged the Festival Theatre into the round. I’m somewhat dubious, as I think “three quarters round” like the RSC, or The Globe are the best shapes … I like a back wall to hide stuff, and the actors don’t have to relate four ways. The Festival Theatre is like a half circle in the first place. I must note that the play script mentions French windows at the back and a curtain, so assumes most productions will be on a proscenium stage.
My actor friend also persuaded me that Ayckbourn is a joy to learn for the cast because every line falls so naturally from the one before, and that the Norman Conquests is the best of the lot.
On the triple play days, Chichester has decided to try different orders. Our day was the most frequent, first Table Manners, then Living Together then finally Round and Round The Garden. That’s also the order in which they appear in the Samuel French text of The Norman Conquests and that’s the order in which they appear on the programme front cover. It’s the order in which Thames TV presented them in its award-winning 1977 television version. I have the feeling that’s right. Each play has two acts, with two scenes in each. The programme gives times for the action. I suspect that you really need to know this too. I might have projected a time somewhere for each scene.
Act Two Scene Two of Round & Round The Garden is Sunday 9 a.m. in the play script, while the last scene of the other two plays is Sunday 8 a.m. That places it as the last event in time, and its ending is surely the natural ender for the three.
A three play day can be a marathon. We’ve done The Globe’s Henry VI 1-3, the Wars of The Roses and The Young Chekhov triple days in recent years. This one’s a doddle. The plays are short and pithy, are beautifully propelled, and Chichester’s plentiful loos, coffee shops and ice-cream sellers, plus a short walk outside for fresh air make it the most pleasant theatre of all for such a three play day.
In the last couple of years, Florian Zeller has been acclaimed for paired dramas in The Father and The Mother, then in The Truth and The Lie. Ayckbourn was there 44 years earlier with The Norman Conquests trilogy, and Ayckbourn had the sense to use one cast throughout. Ayckbourn also has greater theatricality, and on the sexual attitudes of the middle classes, he has none of the self-satisfied “Aren’t we urbane?” smugness of Zeller.
Lobby display
On seeing three in a day, The Norman Conquests with this cast and director is a masterpiece. It has been set here, as written, in 1973 or 1974. Costumes and props match perfectly. There’s a lobby display of a room divider filled with artefacts of the era. I can’t see that it necessarily has to be 1973, though the play has aspects like Reg’s elaborate board game that were definitely of that time. The sexual attitudes, just a few years after The Pill, are of the time too.
Blanche McIntyre has had a busy year with the RSC’s Titus Andronicus as well as The Norman Conquests. Titus Andronicus was odd … cruising through the first half as a brilliant production, then blowing it with daft humour in the second. She’s much more assured here. The text is clear on what happens for starters. Added business, especially in Round & Round The Garden is superb.
set detail. Steps from auditorium to stage
The set is detailed in a way that only Chichester does. Because you walk right up to the stage to get to your seats, you see the fine detail. Real brickwork. Plants. If you look down, there are (painted) realistic weeds in the path to the garden.
Our triple day was especially important, in that Sir Alan Ayckbourn was in the audience, and in the restaurant between Living Together and Round & Round The Garden just two tables away. In the interval in the last play, he was also going into the gents as I was coming out. That’s democracy. The chance to see the trilogy live with such a stunning cast must have been unmissable. I’m delighted that none of us disturbed him. It may be a Chichester thing. In the days when the restaurant was self-service, we stood with our trays behind Patrick Stewart, who we were about to see in Macbeth and no one disturbed him either.
TABLE MANNERS
17th October 11 a.m.
The dining room.
Act 1 Scene 1: Saturday 6 pm
Act 1 Scene 2: Sunday 9 am
Act 2 Scene 1: Sunday 8 pm
Act 2 Scene 2 Monday 9 am
Who’s who? There are three siblings, Reg, an estate agent, and his sisters Ruth, a financial go-getter, and Annie who is stuck alone at the old family house looking after the bedridden mother. Tom, a local vet, has been hanging around the house for years but has not yet plucked up the courage to ask her out. Tom is nice, but ineffectual and dim with human beings.
It’s July. They haven’t met up since Christmas. Annie is going away for the weekend, and Reg and his wife Sarah, are coming to stay to look after Mother (who is never seen). It transpires that Annie’s weekend away is to be with Norman, her philandering brother-in-law, i.e. Ruth’s husband. Norman has turned up to meet Annie secretly, but when Sarah discovers the plan, she puts a stop to it. As Norman drowns his sorrows in parsnip wine and dandelion wine, he gets horrendously drunk, and Ruth is called to come to the house too. Basically, Norman has his eye on all three women.
The home-made wine is an early 70s touch. Those were the days when people bought wine kits at Boots (OK, I did) to make wine at home free of tax. A friend made vast quantities of fruit and vegetable wines. I remember asking him what the orange one was. Answer? Carrot. And the brown one? Carrot too. But he hadn’t washed the carrots. No matter, the dirt will fall to the bottom, alcohol will kill any germs, and the clean wine removed with a pipette.
Perhaps the main reason why I would choose to see Table Manners first is that we get the crucial revelation of Annie’s planned dirty weekend in East Grinstead with her sister’s husband, Norman, right at the start. Sarah Hadland’s bustling, cleanliness obsessed portrait of Sarah is the funniest possible start too, checking the tines of a fork, making sure a seat is clean before sitting. All the cast inhabit their roles superbly, but Sarah Hadland will definitely be in my ten best female actors of the year for this one. It’s a pity there aren’t more online photos of her in the role.
Each of the plays has at least a couple of tears of laughter down the face moments, and in Part One of this it’s the Sarah-Reg row, culminating in throwing the tin of wilting water biscuits. It’s also the play where we get to see Tom’s range of glum, hangdog expressions best of all.
It’s an interesting choice to have Norman with a Welsh accent … following a tradition of Welshmen as particularly sex-obsessed that stretches back theatrical centuries. It works well with the accent.
Sunday evening. Clockwise from 6 o’clock. Reg (Jonathan Broadbent) back to us. Norman (Trystan Gravelle), Tom (John Holingsworth) in low seat, Sarah (Sarah Hadland), Annie (Jemima Rooper), With (Hattie Ladbury)
Act One Scene Two. I thought the breakfast table showed up the problems of working in the round, and also that they were totally aware of them. Chichester is not so much truly in the round (as the Old Vic has been) as a set of seats at the back of the normal stage. If that consists of even 10% of the audience, I’d be surprised. I’d say less. So in Act One, Scene Two, the long breakfast scene, Norman has two very long non-stop speeches while everyone ignores him. His back was placed to the smallest audience section on the rear stage. The right decision, but that very long high speed delivery (magnificently done by Trystan Gravelle) would have been hard to follow from the rear.
The third meal where Tom ends up on the very low seat is hilarious … John Hollingworth triumphs here, as he does in the fight with Norman, now dressed in the deceased father of the family’s blazer and medals.
A favourite line is when Reg (Jonathan Broadbent) looks at the soft, semi-toasted stone cold piece of toast on the table. He’s told to make himself a fresh piece of toast. On return, without toast he says:
I looked at the grill, and I looked at the loaf and I thought – that’s a lot of effort for a piece of toast. I’ll make do with this piece.
I’ve been there!
LIVING TOGETHER
17th October, 3 p.m.
The living room
Act 1 Scene 1: Saturday 6.30 pm
Act 1 Scene 2: Saturday 8 pm
Act 2 Scene 1: Sunday 9 pm
Act 2 Scene 2 Monday 8 am
The siblings: Reg (Jonathan Broadbent), Ruth (Hattie Ladbury), Annie (Jemima Rooper)
Patrick Marmion in The Daily Mail review said:
You can see all three plays in a day or on separate nights. If I had to see just one, I’d go for Living Together, the most tightly wrought of these vintage examples of sexual shenanigans.
I’d disagree. It’s the shortest of the three … 95 minutes plus interval. I think it would be the most difficult of the three to follow as a single play. Perhaps you’d have to see it first and alone to be sure. It may be the one where the fleeting links from the other two are funniest.
In each of the plays the focus changes, and a different cast member gets to shine brightest. In Living Together, I’d say Reg and Norman. Reg has designed his own board game, and wants everyone to play. Board games were a 70s and 80s thing, with new ideas being trumpeted and heavily advertised at Christmas. We accumulated a cupboard full of them. They failed every time because it took so long to explain the rules, not everyone had the patience to persist (Sarah in this one) or the ability to follow the explanation (Tom) or the sobriety (Norman). The reactions were so familiar to me. Boxing Day. My companion was always in the impatient Sarah role (Let’s just get on with it …). When others were reading out the explanations, I often found myself in Tom’s position. How could you remember all this? Reg’s game is complex, and he explodes at criticism, demonstrating the ludicrous basis for chess piece moves in a storm of temper which got a rare mid-scene burst of audience applause. Jonathan Broadbent got a similar scene stopper round of applause in Round & Round The Garden too.
Norman (Trystan Gravelle) is comatose on the rug. Reg (Jonathan Broadbent) and Tom (John Hollingsworth) look on.
Norman manages to get back on Ruth’s good side too, and ends up asleep with her on the hearth rug, which was the scene for his reported Christmas encounter with Annie too.
Ah, the faulty skein in the perfect Persian carpet. When Norman puts a record on the wind-up vintage gramophone, he takes a 45 rpm 7 inch single from the rack (all the other records look like 10″ 78s). I don’t think wind up gramophones with curved silver tone arms ever operated at 45 rpm. BUT Trystan Gravelle gives us a fine operatic singalong.
ROUND & ROUND THE GARDEN
17th October, 7.30 pm
The garden
Act 1 Scene 1: Saturday 5.30 pm
Act 1 Scene 2: Saturday 9 pm
Act 2 Scene 1: Sunday 11 am
Act 2 Scene 2 Monday 9 am
Tom (Trystan Gravelle) in hiding at the start.
We had the garden surrounding the stage all the way through, with grass right up to the front row. Now it covers the set, and a tree is suspended above us, and a swing hangs down too. Each play has a suspended piece of set … a chandelier in Table Manners, a chimney breast in Living Together and a tree in this where the cat is stuck. Tom is wonderfully embarrassed and diffident and hesitant throughout. The cat is Tom’s excuse to keep coming to visit Annie.
TOM: I’m afraid I do rather use him, actually. As a reason for coming
ANNIE: Well, there’s no need. You’re welcome any time. It seems a bit unfair to keep pumping him full of medicine, just as an excuse for a meal.
The garden sequence starts at 5.30 Saturday, so is the earliest part in sequence, and ends latest.
Tom looking at Ruth (Hattie Ladbury)
Ruth and Tom shine here, with Ruth trying to explain to Tom how to woo a woman and Tom getting totally the wrong end of the stick. It has the best moment of the whole production, at the end of Act 2 Scene 1, where Norman and Annie are rolling around on the grass while Reg and Tom talk about cars, completely oblivious to what’s going on behind them. Then when they do see, Tom decides Ruth wants him to do the same. You realise the stage has been designed with a slope to facilitate what happens next … and it is an addition.
Tom (John Hollingsworth) and Reg (Jonathan Broadbent) chatter while Norman and Annie get going behind them.
The garden also has the “throwing a ball” sequence where Reg invents yet another game. At one point Reg’s ball went into the audience and he had to retrieve it. Whether this as accidental, or rehearsed in, I don’t know, but it was Jonathan Broadbent’s second piece of show stopping applause. I suspect it’s built in, or at least “allowed for” because they have a spare ball among the grasses.
Overall? The consensus is four stars. I’d agree on individual plays, but the cumulative effect of the three together deserves an extra star.
*****
AFTERWORD: THE TV SERIES, 1977
1977 CAST:
Reg – Richard Briers
Sarah – Penelope Keith
Norman – Tom Conti
Annie – Penelope Wilton
Tom – David Troughton
Ruth – Fiona Walker
The past history of the trilogy interests me. I vaguely recalled seeing it on TV, and the DVD is available, so we ordered it after seeing it at Chichester. The cast had shifted from the 1974 stage version … Penelope Keith maintained her role as Sarah, but Richard Briers played Reg, Penelope Wilton played Annie (replacing Felicity Kendal) and Tom Conti was Norman. They’re the four mentioned in publicity, ignoring David Troughton as Tom and Fiona Walker as Ruth.
The sitcom connections are strong. The original Annie (Felicity Kendal) played Richard Brier’s wife in The Good Life (1975-1978) with Penelope Keith as the snobby neighbour, Margo. It was running at the same time as the TV version of The Norman Conquests. Then Penelope Wilton (also Annie) was Richard Brier’s wife, Ann, in Ever Decreasing Circles (1984-1989). David Troughton, barely worthy of mention in 1977, played Dr Bob Buzzard in Andrew Davies’ surreal comedy series A Very Peculiar Practice in 1986 and 1988. Dr Bob Buzzard was the GP as businessman … looking forward to our current Health Service.
The TV series of The Norman Conquests is filmed like a sitcom, I suspect, minus the studio audience for feedback laughter. I have watched sitcom studio filming, and the director has multiple cameras and cuts between them live. So on TV it has a sitcom feel. They’re also very much filmed plays. I guess theoretically they could be intercut on film between the three play locations as a continuous narrative. That would lose all the recognition fun and puzzle.
L to R: Reg, Norman, Annie, Tom, Sarah in 1977
BUT the main conclusion we came to is that every cast member at Chichester live comes across better than their 1977 counterparts. The Welshness of Tristan Gravelle’s Norman works far better than Tom Conti’s constricted RP Norman. Penelope Keith is a British institution, but her Sarah and her Margo, and indeed her Lady Bracknell at Bath, are the same basic character … voted Best TV Actress in 1977 for this play. Sarah Hadwell at Chichester is not RP snobby, and the business of walking on and off so precisely in heels is very funny. I preferred her interpretation throughout. I guess we’ve all seen Richard Briers many times, but again his toothy sincerity is not as funny as Jonathan Broadbent’s interpretation. For Tom, John Hollingsworth towers over the youthful David Troughton’s too-theatrical version … and David Troughton is one of our very favourite actors. Hattie Ladbury is a more imposing Ruth in every way. Jemima Rooper’s scruffy, grubby-looking Annie is a definite improvement too.
I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting 1977, but it confirmed that this cast in 2017 are the best I’ve seen with the play.
BOOKING
Chichester could improve the booking system for triple play days. We saw the 11 a.m. play from Row D, moved to Row E for 3 pm, and then to Row F for 7.30 pm. You couldn’t block book the three. I’d say it was 75% full at 11, and virtually full for the other two, because some weren’t booking the triple. Also, if my memory is right, we selected the “Over 60s” discount as we selected each in turn, which meant we lost the “book all three plays” discount which was much greater. I hope the triple day, as with Young Chekhov, becomes a fixture, and if so, they need a separate booking button for the three. That’s how The Rose, Kingston does it. One click. Same seats for all the plays.
WHAT THE PAPERS SAID ABOUT CHICHESTER
4
Michael Billington, The Guardian ****
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ****
Dominic Maxwell, The Times, ****
Jane Edwardes, Sunday Times ****
Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard ****
Mark Shenton, The Stage ****
Patrick Marmion, The Daily Mail ****
AYCKBOURN PLAYS REVIEWED ON THIS BLOG:
How The Other Half Loves, Salisbury Playhouse 2023
Communicating Doors by Alan Ayckbourn, Menier Chocolate Factory, 2015
Neighbourhood Watch by Alan Ayckbourn, Stephen Joseph Company, Bath Theatre Royal
Way Upstream by Alan Ayckbourn, Salisbury Playhouse
Woman in Mind, Alan Ayckbourn, Chichester 2022
BLANCHE McINTYRE
Titus Andronicus, RSC 2017
The Two Noble Kinsmen, RSC 2016
Noises Off, Nuffield, Southampton, 2016
As You Like It, Globe 2015
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, Brighton, 2015
The Comedy of Errors, Globe 2014
The Seagull, Headlong / Nuffield 2013
JONATHAN BROADBENT
Queen Anne, RSC 2015
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Theseus / Oberon)
My Night With Reg (Guy)
Love For Love by William Congreve, RSC
HATTIE LADBURY|
An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde, Chichester 2014
The Comedy of Errors, Globe 2014
The Seven Year Itch, by George Axelrod, Salisbury Playhouse, 2012
The Game of Love & Chance by Pierre Mariveaux, Salisbury Playhouse, 2011
JEMIMA ROOPER
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Young Vic, 2017 (Hermia)
One Man, Two Guvnors, by Richard Bean, original 2012 production (Rachel)
TRYSTAN GRAVELLE
The Changeling, Middleton & Rowley, The Wanamaker Playhouse 2015
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