Living Together/ Round and Round the Garden. Two episodes of Ayckbourns Trilogy reaches new heights of flawless gusto!

Photo Lois Siegel.  John P Kelly director of the NOrman conquests

If you think your personal relationships are sometimes fraught, check out Living Together, the second part of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy The Norman Conquests now in a terrific revival at The Gladstone. Your problems will pale by comparison.

The comic-with-a-bite trilogy consists of three separate but related plays: Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden. Table Manners opened The Gladstone’s season a couple of weeks ago, Round and Round the Garden opens Sept. 25, and all three will play in repertory starting Sept. 29. On Oct. 10, the three plays will be presented in one fell swoop.

Each play features the same six characters played by the same six actors in roughly the same plot: adult family members gather at the family country home to care for an aging mother, bringing with them a mountain of emotional baggage, countless unresolved grievances, and a smorgasbord of human failings. They’re joined by a non-family member – a feckless veterinarian named Tom (David Whiteley) who’s courting, kind of, the tempestuous Annie (Michelle LeBlanc) – and the weekend disintegrates into hilarious dysfunction. Annie’s brother Reg (Steve Martin), a glad-handing real estate agent, is a burr under the saddle of his control-freak wife Sarah (Margo MacDanald) who also squabbles with anyone in sight. The titular Norman (AL Connors), a world-class sleaze, attempts to bed anyone with an XX chromosome even though he’s married to Ruth (Julie Le Gal), the driven but vulnerable sister of Reg and Annie. The mother, probably mercifully, never appears.

By changing the location of each play, Ayckbourn is able to shade the storyline with new insights into the characters and their increasingly complex relationships. The second and third plays also fill in sections of the weekend that were not revealed in the preceding plays.

The plays are funny, but Ayckbourn gives us more than mere hilarity. The trilogy is also a savage attack on the clueless, self-entitled middle class of 1970s Britain and an alternately sardonic and poignant look at relationships in general.

With Living Together, director John P. Kelly and his ensemble cast have hit their collective stride. The show moves at a fine clip, the humour stings, and the actors, despite minimal rehearsal time (they’re rehearsing the next show even as the current one is still running), deliver with flawless gusto.

Round and Round the Garden

With this play, director John P. Kelly and company bring Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy The Norman Conquests to a bitingly hilarious conclusion.

The same gang of fractious, self-absorbed characters we met in the two previous plays – Table Manners and Living Together – are back, played by the same solid team of actors. This time the action takes place in the garden, and Ayckbourn opens the show with a scene that actually precedes the opening scene of the first play and ends it with a scene that takes place just after the final scene of the first two plays, making the trilogy a kind of endless snake-biting-its-own-tail.

It’s fascinating, over the course of the three plays, to watch the relationships between the six characters grow more complex, the bond of actors to characters deepen, and our connection as audience members with each of the characters morph into almost an old acquaintanceship (to call it friendship would demand far more forgiveness than most of us could muster).

Kelly’s directorial sense of timing in Round and Round the Garden is, as we’ve come to expect, superb. He knows just when to hold back and when to pull the trigger, making the characters’ concerns – sex, love, loneliness, power – screamingly funny even as they shift into the poignant. The funny/sad desperation of Annie, Ruth and Sarah makes for particularly rich mining.

This is a rare opportunity for Ottawa theatre-goers to see Ayckbourn’s trilogy and to see it done up in style. The shows move into repertory starting Sept. 29, and all three run on Oct. 10.

This is a rare opportunity for Ottawa theatre-goers to see Ayckbourn’s trilogy and to see it done up in style. The shows move into repertory starting Sept. 29, and all three run on Oct. 10.

The Norman Conquests

SevenThirty Productions & Plosive Productions

At The Gladstone

Norman: AL Connors

Annie: Michelle LeBlanc

Ruth: Julie Le Gal

Sarah: Margo MacDonald

Reg: Steve Martin

Tom: David Whiteley

Director: John P. Kelly

Stage and Production Management: Richard Cliff

Assistant Director: Nicolas Alain

Set and Lighting Design: David Magladry

Costume Design: Vanessa Imeson

Sound Design: Steven Lafond

Props Design: Jess Preece

Assistant Stage Manager: Lydia Talajic

Scenic Artist: Carolyn Borer