Gladstone’s New Season Has A Super Launching With The Norman Conquests
Photo by David Whiteley
There’s a moment in The Norman Conquests when actor Steve Martin shows up on the Gladstone Theatre stage carrying a wastebasket. The moment is amusing in itself, and it integrates neatly into John P. Kelly’s funny and perceptive production. But to discover the full story behind the arrival of that receptacle, you’ll have to pay a return visit to the Gladstone — and you’ll probably want to do so.
The reason is that what we’re seeing at the moment is a play called Table Manners, a single instalment of Alan Ayckbourn’s marvellous trilogy about a weekend of domestic chaos. In this one, we’re witnessing the events that occur in the dining room. Coming up in a couple of weeks is Living Together, which will introduce us to unspeakable occurrences during that same time period in the living room and also tell us more about that wastebasket. Finally we’ll be getting Round And Round the Garden, which takes us outdoors into the garden where the trilogy’s central character — a bearded womanizing librarian named Norman — will be wreaking further havoc on the lives of those about him. One hopes that the next two entries will match the quality of this opening production.
As a playwright, Ayckbourn has repeatedly been drawn to feats of structural juggling. Something unusual in his creative psyche has brought us items like How The Other Half Loves with its double image of two living rooms occupying the same space; Communicating Doors with its use of a hotel suite as a vehicle for time travel; and Absurd Person Singular which places the same group of couples in three separate kitchens on three consecutive Christmas eves. These and other plays testify to Acykbourn’s credentials as a restless experimenter. And the Norman Conquests trilogy is particularly audacious — a challenge for Ayckbourn in fitting the right pieces into the right place in his three-play jigsaw, a challenge as well to the director and actors in keeping everything working.
But it is never a challenge to the audience — provided it has the kind of production values visible at the Gladstone the other night. Let’s be clear about this — each of the three plays works on its own as a stand-alone piece. Attendance at only one of them can provide a satisfying evening’s entertainment. Take in all of them and you’ll find that they can be viewed in any order without impeding your enjoyment — and indeed all three will be available in repertory in the later portion of the run.
This is part of the seductive fun of The Norman Conquests: it is so cunningly concocted that you do want to see all three plays. In the case of Table Manners, there’s a morning-after-the-night-before sequence at the breakfast table — one that leaves you in a state of delicious wonderment about the exact nature of the appalling events that must have occurred the evening before in the living room. And the only way to find out what happened is to come back and see Living Together.
The centrifuge for all this is Norman — bearded, goggle-eyed, manipulative, intensely self-absorbed, indifferent — or possibly oblivious — to the chaos he’s capable of creating in the lives of others. That’s the character who starts taking shape in in AL Connors’s deftly observed performance — one who also manages to exude a scruffy sexual charisma along with a mournful puppy-dog vulnerability. This Norman doesn’t go so far as to make a mess on the carpet, but if he did he’d wonder why everyone was making a fuss about it and then complain about constantly being misunderstood.
We don’t meet Norman until the play’s second scene. That’s the breakfast sequence, and everyone else at the table is so infuriated with him when he shows up in his pyjamas that they won’t even respond to his attempts at conversation. As a result, Norman does most of the talking, meaning that Connors must begin defining Norman’s character with what is — in effect — an extended monologue expressing his bafflement at the way he’s being treated. Connors ably carries out his side of the equation, but — under John P. Kelly’s attentive direction — the other people at the breakfast table also provide a splendid demonstration of the comic tensions that can be wrought by a collective hostile silence.
And who are these other characters? Well, there’s Annie, portrayed by Michelle LeBlanc with a jumpy bedraggled brilliance. Her home in the country provides the play’s setting. Annie, who cares for her unseen dragon of a bedridden mother, is off to East Grinstead for a break — one of the play’s ongoing jokes is that no one in their right mind would go to a place like this for a holiday — so her brother Reg (Steve Martin) and uptight sister-in-law Sarah (Margo MacDonald) have shown up to care for mom in Annie’s absence.
However we quickly learn that Annie is planning a dirty weekend with Norman who just happens to be married to Annie’s sister Ruth (Julie Le Gal). To complicate matters further, Annie has a tongue-tied admirer hovering in the background in the person of Tom, a country veterinarian who, in David Whiteley’s hilariously vacuous portrait, is as thick as a plank when it comes to dealing with romance rather than horses.
Table Manners offers an impressive example of fine ensemble acting. Both that memorable breakfast scene and a subsequent dinner scene, when even the question of who is going to sit where kindles smouldering resentments, are major tests, and the cast comes through with confidence.
That this is first and foremost a character-driven play is made evident with every performance. Julie Le Gal is fascinating as the philandering Norman’s myopic wife Ruth: she may be too vain to wear glasses, but there’s a steely intelligence here and that includes a clear-eyed understanding of the psychology of her feckless spouse. Margo MacDonald has the tough assignment of depicting the fastidious, controlling, class-conscious Sarah without falling into caricature. She’s a bit stiff and mannered early in the play, but gradually she becomes an effective comic foil. As her henpecked husband, Reg, Steve Martin is great with the jovial, slightly hollow bonhomie, but he’s also excellent in reminding us that this a play about relationships; that’s why there’s something genuinely warming about the least damaged of these relationships as provided in his brother-sister scenes with Michelle LeBlanc’s Annie: these are siblings with a genuine affection and amused tolerance towards each other.
A critic once likened The Norman Conquests to Chekhov on nitrous oxide — and indeed there is a Chekhovian ruefulness threading through the comedy. Its plays are tricky to define and to dismiss them as mere sex farces is to short-change them. They are not only rich in character but also in social detail, and as Ayckbourn’s biographer, Michael Billington, observed more than 40 years ago, the plays in this trilogy are funny because they deal with serious issues. In this case, they involve a family weekend that degenerates into turmoil and lays bare the fault lines in various relationships.
John P. Kelly’s production is therefore balanced and thoughtful while also offering a further demonstration of this director’s great skill in staging comedy. Designer David Magladry has provided a solidly functional set for Table Manners, and it will be interesting to see what he does with the other two plays, — in particular how he copes with the technical demands of making it possible to see all three instalments, each in a different settings, on a single day, which is what will be happening late in the run. Vanessa Imeson’s serviceable costumes contribute further to the sleek, confident quality of this production. In brief, a fine opening to the Gladstone’s new season.
The Norman Conquests
By Alan Ayckbourn
Co-produced by Seven Thirty Productions and Plosive Productions at The Gladstone
Table Manners: August 28 to September 5 and in repertory September 30 to October 10.
Living Together: September 11 to 19 and in rep October 1 to 10.
Round and Round the Garden: September 25 and 26 and in rep September 29 to October 10.
All three shows play on October 10.
Director: John P. Kelly
Asst. director: Nicolas Alain
Set and lighting: David Magladry
Sound: Steven Lafond
Costumes: Vanessa Imeson
Cast:
Norman………………………………………………………AL Connors
Annie…………………………………………………………
Ruth…………………………………………………………..
Sarah………………………………………………………….
Reg……………………………………………………………
Tom……………………………………………………………