✭✭✭✩✩ / ✭✭✭✩✩ / ✭✭✭✭✩

by Alan Ayckbourn, directed by Ted Dykstra

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

October 9-November 16, 2013;

February 10-March 8, 2014

Norman: “I was making small talk.”

Ruth: “Yes, well it’s not quite small enough.”

        Table Manners

The Norman Conquests is Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy of ingeniously interlocking comedies.  It’s not really a Mount Everest of comedy as Aeschylus’ Oresteia is of comedy or Shakespeare’s two Tetralogies are of the history play because the three plays aren’t really Ayckbourn’s best work.  Yet, they do present a challenge to both actors and audiences though it is more akin to putting together a puzzle than solving a great mystery.  Other theatre companies have had great success with the trilogy, but compared to the six hours of Soulpepper’s recent staging of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the six hours of Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests seems decidedly lacking in heft.        

In 1973 Ayckbourn set himself the task of constructing three plays following the same six characters over one weekend in a country house.  The trick is that each play is set in a different part of the house.  Table Manners is set in the dining room, Living Together in the living room and Round and Round the Garden in (surprise) the garden.  Further complicating the task, Ayckbourn wanted to make sure that each play could stand on its own and the three could be seen in any order.  That Ayckbourn should succeed at all let alone so well, is a testament to his powers of construction.

The story concerns the philandering of the assistant librarian Norman (Albert Schultz), who is aware of the cruel trick of fate that made him a Don Juan but gave him a body “like a haystack”.  For the weekend in question Norman had promised Annie (Laura Condlln), the sister of his breadwinning wife Ruth (Sarah Mennell), that he would take Annie away for a dirty weekend in Hastings.  Annie could simply say she was going away for the weekend and her brother Reg (Derek Boyes) and wife Sarah (Fiona Reid) could give Annie a break as caregiver to the siblings’ ailing mother.  Annie knows she needs a break but has misgivings about the propriety of sleeping with her sister’s husband and the potential hurt it might cause Tom (Oliver Dennis), a kind but slow-witted veterinarian who clearly loves Annie but can’t bring himself to tell her so, much less act on his feelings.  All goes wrong when Norman can’t wait for Annie at their arranged meeting place in town and comes to the family house instead, and Annie tells the busybody Sarah what she is really doing on the weekend.  The plays end with Norman having made arrangements for a future assignation with each of the three women. 

To pull this story off requires a very special actor to play Norman.  Schultz causes himself two difficulties.  First, he doesn’t simply play the role, he puts on a funny voice in addition to his British accent as if he were imitating a British actor – Alan Bates comes to mind – playing the role.  Second, he and director Ted Dykstra play up the notion that Norman looks like a “haystack” or a “two-ended sheepdog” to such an extent that it is nearly impossible to see how women could be attracted to him.  Norman’s rude behaviour and his promiscuity are hard enough to handle, but his looking like a roughed-up tramp besides makes the women in the play seem either extremely desperate or foolish.   

Schultz’s failure to emanate any sort of charisma seriously compromises the play.  Fortunately, he is surrounded by a mostly able company.  Chief among these is Fiona Reid, who shines brightest in Table Manners.  There she finds delightful comedy in Sarah’s obsessive-compulsive behaviour and bossiness.  Sarah frequently protests how fragile she is only to reveal a total intolerance for everyone around her.  Reid is expert at Sarah’s prime mode of expression which is saying one thing but implying exactly the opposite. 

Her equal in a completely contrasting role is Oliver Dennis as Tom.  Dennis never ceases to amaze with the range and versatility of his comedic talents and his Tom is one of the chief delights of the trilogy.  Dennis makes him as awkward physically as he is verbally and socially.  He manages to make Tom appear incredibly slow-witted but not idiotic.  The extended quid pro quo that occurs between Tom and Ruth in Round and Round the Garden is so hilarious because it is so understandable.  While we may laugh at his social ineptitude, we realize, as does everyone in the play, that he is a fundamentally kind and good person.  It is fitting that he is no good at games or jokes because he is no good at the social games that people like Sarah and Norman are constantly playing.    

Sarah Mennell makes the difficult role of Ruth seem easy.  Mennell makes Ruth practically ooze a cynicism that helps us understand how a wife can laugh at the frequent infidelities of a husband like Norman.  Why Ruth as the breadwinner of the couple continues to pay to have Norman around, however, is not as clear.  One difficulty with the play and Dykstra’s direction is that Ruth and Sarah are almost identically brittle and self-righteous.  Ruth enters late in each play so that Dykstra and Mennell should give Ruth some qualities to help distinguish her brittleness from the brittleness that Sarah has already established.

Reg, as played by Derek Boyes, is the least developed character of the trilogy.  His love of inventing board games is a central feature in Living Together but is never mentioned in the other two plays.  All we get from Boyes is that Reg is jolly and childish and little more.  Dykstra gives him a snorting laugh that Boyes uses far too often.  Strangely, though Reg and Sarah have had the longest relationship of any of the three couples in the play, it is impossible to understand how they ever came to marry. 

Norman may give his name to the play, but the figure we care about most is Annie.  Laura Condlln creates a superb portrait of this young woman, ground down by giving her life to caring for an ungrateful mother and fallen into despair that she will ever know happiness outside of the meaningless fling Norman offers her.  Condlln shows us why Annie would allow herself to be wooed by someone like Norman but she also shows us she knows she has no illusions about him.  Condlln also makes it painfully clear why Tom’s inability to express emotions frustrates Annie to tears.  It is a wonderfully multilayered portrait of loneliness and unhappiness.

Despite the fact that Ayckbourn wanted to write a trilogy that could be seen in any order, the plays have always been printed and first presented, as Soulpepper does, in the order Table, Living, Garden.  Circumstances forced me to see Table last, and I must say that, contrary to Ayckbourn’s goal, I did feel that I was seeing the plays out of order.  In seeing Living first, I felt as if I had come in on the middle of something since the audience who had already seen Table were laughing uproariously at things that meant nothing to me.  Clearly, in these plays context is everything.  Garden contains both the chronologically earliest and latest scenes in the trilogy – “Saturday 5:30pm”, which provides all the exposition for the events we have witnessed, and “Monday 9pm” which shows us the what finally happens to everyone, especially Norman. 

If you had to choose only one play from the series, Garden provides the best overview of the story.  As a stand-alone play, however, Table Manners is probably the most successful because it is so grounded in the repeated rituals of dining and so easily contrasts the formalities of the table with the rudeness of the people around it.  The problem with seeing it third is that it offered no new insights on characters who quickly were becoming tiresome in their unchangeability.  Living Together is the most traditionally farcical of the three but also the least satisfying.  What helps raise Table and especially Garden out of the realm of farce is Ayckbourn’s depiction of the real unhappiness that ultimately defines all the characters.

The Norman Conquests hasn’t been staged professionally in Toronto since the enormously popular production by the now-defunct Phoenix Theatre in 1978.  People who saw that production tell me it was hysterically funny whereas the current Soulpepper production strikes me as only mildly amusing.  One problem is that Dykstra’s pacing is not snappy enough.  Another is that Dykstra has not quite mastered directing in the round.  Watching the wonderful play of conflict in reactions of Fiona Reid’s Sarah, the most repressed of the three women, is not to be missed.  Yet, due to Ken MacKenzie’s sets and Dykstra’s blocking, you will miss it if you sit in the southwest corner of the theatre during Garden or in the northwest corner during Table.  In Living Together, Dykstra makes much better use of the space and everyone should have a chance to see a good share of her priceless reactions wherever they sit.       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Sarah Mennell, Fiona Reid, Albert Schultz and Laura Condlln in Table Manners; Derek Boyes, Albert Schultz, Oliver Dennis and Sarah Mennell in Table Manners; Laura Condlln, Albert Schultz and Fiona Reid in Living Together. ©2013 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.