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Ayckbourn’s unflinching gaze

Veronica Lee

Wednesday, 24th September 2008

Veronica Lee profiles the playwright as the Old Vic revives his best-known work

The Norman Conquests is a trilogy — Table Manners, Living Together and Round and Round the Garden — designed to be seen either as self-contained pieces, or as one whole work, and concerns the complicated love lives of three couples: Norman and his wife, Ruth; Ruth’s brother Reg and his wife, Sarah; and Ruth and Reg’s younger sister, Annie, and her putative boyfriend, Tom. The action takes place in Annie’s house (and its garden) over one weekend, and is told from a different couple’s viewpoint in a different setting each time.

After a brief run at Scarborough in 1973 and then another at Greenwich Theatre in London, the trilogy became a huge hit in the West End in 1974, with Tom Courtenay as Norman. It made stars of the rest of its previously unknown cast: Michael Gambon, Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith and, later in its 18-month run, Julia McKenzie, and ran on Broadway for seven months.

Norman (played in the Old Vic production by Stephen Mangan, of Green Wing fame) feels it is his duty to keep every woman in his life happy, and the way he thinks a man keeps a woman happy is to lust after her. The trilogy came just a few years after the publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and Norman’s view of women — or perhaps that should be Ayckbourn’s — might be considered hopelessly out of date in 2008. But not so, says Amanda Root, who plays Sarah. ‘Although women’s issues have obviously progressed since it was written,’ she says, ‘gender politics and male/female roles at home and at work are still as potentially fraught with tension today.