| . | 04/29/2009
THE NORMAN CONQUESTS
By: Eugene Paul
The cast of The Norman Conquests
photo by Joan Marcus
London’s Old Vic has sent over its smash hit revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests for New York’s pleasure and, let’s face it, Norman’s pheromones are of a potency to rattle your cages even though Norman looks like something the cat drug in. Eyes wide with guilelessness and libido even wider, Norman (Stephen Mangan) flumps into the garden in Round and Round the Garden the first, second or third of the plays in the trilogy sensibly known as The Norman Conquests.Table Manners and Living Together follow. Or precede. Or whatever. I prefer Round and Round the Garden first because you get acquainted with this absorbingly delicious lot on the giggle level and know full well why you’re belly laughing later on.
Norman arrives with soul riving cries of “Nobody loves me!” and proceeds to seduce everybody in sight, male or female, including his wife. Innocently. It’s the pheromones, you see. There’s Annie (Jessica Hynes), his unmarried sister-in-law he’s come to take away for a weekend of unbridled sexual bliss. And there’s Sarah (Amanda Root), his married sister-in-law who says she hates him but oozes into his clutches. And there’s Sarah’s husband, Reg (Paul Ritter) who he just grabs, gropes and kisses wildly, much to Reg’s confusion. There’s also Tom (Ben Miles) the long time, shy, dull, thick, suitor to Annie who doesn’t know his own mind until it is more or less told to him that he’s supposed to marry Annie. And, of course, there’s Ruth (Amelia Bullmore), Norman’s wife. Who has learned to cope. She thinks. But coping with Norman who is a rag tag force of Nature, is not something any of them are particularly adept at. And they know it. Does Norman? Does he care? He just wants to be loved, communally, serially, happenstancially, any old way. Love, love, love. Makes the world go round and round the garden and all that.
Alan Ayckbourn’s plays are never out of season in New York, uptown, downtown, off Broadway or on. Including The Norman Conquests, there have been productions of half a dozen of his seventy-one plays just in the past year. It’s not an addiction, its affection. There’s something so funny, so endearing, so delightfully off-kilter about the hapless folk who try to behave like proper people and manage to make their attempts at civility a shambles and a hoot. You cannot help laughing, especially with this marvelous company, but you sympathize even as you feel happily superior in your secure state, not tugged and jostled by the undertones of sense versus sex or vice versa. Or just vice. Or just versa. Alan Ayckbourn’s got your number.
And director Matthew Warchus knows it. He’s taken such a delicate touch to the plays that they seem almost to evolve, but never doubt Warchus isn’t firmly, if delicately in control. His pregnant pauses are some of the longest, funniest, cleverest on stage. Every one of Norman’s progressions from eye locks to lip locks, priceless. Every effort by Tom to formulate an agonizing, coherent response screamingly funny, every bit of positively vaudevillian nonsense perfectly, logically, side splitting.
All three plays take place during a single weekend, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, in dry, warm, July weather, which should be balm and ease to the English but, unfortunately this family gathering takes place in a run down, Victorian country house presided over by the heavy, unseen presence of bedridden Mother, whose bed comforts consist of medicines and hot water bottles where once they were measured in as many young , stalwart males as Mother could snag and shag, especially sailors. She is, of course, resultantly not in good temper and most of that bile falls on Annie who lives there with her, cares for her, aching to get away. So that when Norman proposes they run off together for a weekend of sex, she is more than ready. And calls on Sarah and Reg to take over care of Mother. While Norman takes care of her. And Tom? Oh, bother.
Of course, it all comes undone and everyone finds out everything. And by now, they are old friends you smiled and giggled at in one of the plays and are now bursting with lusty guffaws over in the other plays. Amanda Root, who you met as Sarah, was lovely, pinched, dismal fun but now she’s an all out riot of complex frustrations. Ruth, Norman’s careerist wife, has become gorgeously absurd as Amelia Bullmore unerringly displays her vanities and dead on serious incapability in setting up a sling chair. Ben Miles as Tom is so haplessly thick your sides hurt. Annie we need as the mashed on foil in all this and Jessica Hynes is invaluable. Norman? Well, with Stephen Mangan in full control of the uncontrollable force, Norman keeps being Norman, his sex drive in all gears, our absolute favorite howler. Do you wonder Reg (Paul Ritter) seems to lose his funny factor and his faculties? Well, then, you don’t know Alan Ayckbourn, his creator. By the time you’ve seen all three plays, you feel fully fortified with laughter at this familiar bunch you’ve come to know so well, fully satisfied, finally, enough of a good thing. The plaudits for Ayckbourn have built over the years. The plays haven’t changed. They’ve been this good all along. But now, he’s Chekhovian. Makes you think. While laughing. Rob Howell’s scenery and costumes do beautifully in the round as well as for the play and players, and everything works handsomely. Ohhh, such fun.
Circle in the Square Theater, 50th Street between Broadway and 8th Avenue. Tickets: 3 plays:$107-$355. Or call 212-239-6200 for schedule.
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