Archives for January 4, 2008

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to a review of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests. Here’s a sample.
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Alan Ayckbourn, the most prolific and successful playwright since Shakespeare, has written 71 plays, only six of which have been seen on Broadway. Why is he so popular in Great Britain and so comparatively little known over here? Part of the problem is that most of his plays are more serious than they look. He uses the dizzy language of farce to say dark things about the sorrows and disappointments of middle-class life, and the harder you laugh at his hapless characters, the more your heart goes out to them.
The good news is that many of Mr. Ayckbourn’s plays are seen with fair frequency both Off Broadway and in regional theaters. Alas, the latter fact has not yet come to the attention of Variety, which ran a piece last month saying that he was “unrecognized in the U.S.” without adding that one of his most ambitious and masterly efforts, “The Norman Conquests,” is now being performed by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater–for the second time in that company’s history. London’s Old Vic is reviving “The Norman Conquests” next fall, but the Rep, to the best of my knowledge, is the only professional theater company in America to have done so since it ran on Broadway 32 years ago. I’m happy to report that their new production is an uproariously funny, wholly successful piece of work.
Mr. Ayckbourn’s method can be seen at its maddest in the 1973 triptych that established him as England’s number-one hitmaker. The three plays that make up “The Norman Conquests” feature the same six characters and take place during the same weekend, but are set in three different parts of the same country house, the dining room (“Table Manners”), the sitting room (“Living Together”) and the garden (“Round and Round the Garden”). While the plays are written so that each one makes sense when viewed individually, you learn in the course of watching all three that the title character (played by Gerard Neugent) is not only carrying on extramarital dalliances with a youngish woman named Annie (Finnerty Steeves) and Sarah, her bossy sister-in-law (Laura Gordon), but also canoodling with his estranged wife Ruth (Deborah Staples), Annie’s older sister.
In addition to letting us see the action from a variety of perspectives, this brilliantly ingenious conceit makes it possible for Mr. Ayckbourn to turn up the comic heat on his characters all the way to the boiling point….
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Read the whole thing here.

“Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly on those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour. With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow’s hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.”

Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge