The Norman Conquests (Table Manners, Living Together, Round and Round the Garden)

Published Tuesday 7 October 2008 at 12:10 by Gerald Berkowitz

Alan Ayckbourn’s 1973 trilogy, three full-length plays taking place in the same time frame, with the same characters, in different parts of a house, has all the Ayckbourn signatures of clever construction, delightful and frequently surprising comedy, and the exposure of the hidden sadness below the middle class veneer of respectable contentment.

As three couples gather for a weekend, one feckless husband proves irresistible to all three women, generating not only emotional confusion but a string of deceptions, misunderstandings and farcical encounters.

Matthew Warchus’ revival generates all the laughs while also capturing the loneliness and frustrations underlying the characters’ actions. For this production, the Old Vic has been converted into a theatre-in-the-round, and Warchus has not fully mastered the form, so that too many key comic and dramatic moments can only be fully seen by half the audience.

Stephen Mangan plays Norman with a hangdog deadpan that betrays a real need for emotional connection underlying his seductions. Amanda Root is both comic and touching as a tightly wound control freak who finds herself under his spell, while Ben Miles provides much of the comedy as the slow-thinking neighbour with a perpetual look of bewilderment on his face.

Table Manners is the strongest of the three plays, with a comic dinner party from hell, while Round and Round the Garden, structured to have the first and last scenes in the common chronology, rounds out the dramatic subtexts most touchingly.