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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: The Norman Conquests — The In-Laws and the Outlaw
By Harry Haun
24 Apr 2009
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The Norman Conquests stars Stephen Mangan, Amelia Bullmore and Jessica Hynes; guests Gina Gershon, Alan Cumming and Swoosie Kurtz
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | The Norman Conquests, which began laying waste to American masses at Broadway's Circle in the Square April 23, is smart Brit talk for the old rooster-in-the-henhouse roundelay.
The randy cock in question is a shaggy-haired, shabbily attired assistant librarian, Norman (Stephen Mangan), a self-deluded bloke who fancies himself God's Gift to Women and drives everybody around him to nutty distraction trying to prove it.
During a long, lost, wifeless weekend at her mother's place in the country, this lothario-on-the-loose makes an amorous beeline to his sister-in-law, Annie (Jessica Hynes), then starts buzzing around her sister-in-law, Sarah (Amanda Root), and eventually breaks into an unbridled flash of passion with his brother-in-law, Reg (Paul Ritter).
Soon, time and the wife — Ruth (Amelia Bullmore) — are called, and Ruth tries to rein in the notorious Norman, who enters an innocent, can't-help-it plea. "I'm just . . . magnetic or something," he shrugs hopelessly. By actual count, only one character in the play escapes Norman's clutches — Annie's decidedly thick suitor, Tom (Ben Miles), a small-town vet — but he's such a dim-bulb individual nobody could turn him on, although Ruth certainly gives his circuit a workout.
The architect of this dizzy-making marriage-go-round could only be the prodigiously prolific Alan Ayckbourn, who has written 73 plays in his 70 years.
The action above constitutes the plot of all three plays that make up The Norman Conquests and occur during the same July family gathering. The one difference is that the three plays (each with two acts, insidiously in synch by Ayckbourn to come before or directly after the action in the other two plays) occur in different settings and the characters shed new psychic skins and idiosyncrasies.
Table Manners takes place around the dinner table of the Victorian home of a bedridden, mercifully never-seen matriarch. Living Room moves her kids along to the living room where they attempt board games while imbibing in a variety of will-weakening wines (dandelion, carrot and the dreaded parsnips). Round and Round the Garden takes the action outside for some heretofore untapped roughhousing.
Ayckbourn keeps the action flowing with the precision of a Navy Blue Angels flight formation, and, ultimately, all three plays craftily fit together like a Rubik's Cube. Each is written as a self-contained piece and can be taken as such, or, if you care to look around the corner to what else is going on, the author can gleefully oblige. The recommended dose is all three in one big gulp on a Saturday or Sunday marathon run. [For the record, the play seen on the official opening night April 23 was Round and Round the Garden.]
On the evidence of these three plays — and God of Carnage — director Matthew Warchus qualifies as a master manipulator of ensembles, skillfully steering the two couples in Yasmina Reza's play and the three couples in Ayckbourn's trio. Indeed, he is beginning to loom like his own strongest Tony competition for Best Director.
"Well, I do like comedy," director Warchus was quick to confess — and quick to qualify: "But I try to find the type of comedy that actually feels truthful and says something about life. I am not a big gag person, but I do love comic situations."
His four most conspicuous cases-in-point — "The Normans" and God of Carnage are now playing, so parallels are inevitable. "Certainly, I do think that the plays — The Norman Conquests and God of Carnage — are kinda distant cousins of each other. In 1973 when The Norman Conquests was written and two years ago when God of Carnage was written, the styles of theatre changed definitely, but both writers have a strangely cruel and compassionate observation of life — marriage and relationships, particularly — and somehow both plays, although full of sadness (savagery, actually) in amongst the hilarity, are very healing or semi-uplifting on the subject of relationships. It's like a raft with wounded survivors on it on display. The stage is a sort of an island of agony and ecstasy floating in the middle of this audience. The characters are all desperate, absolutely at the end of their rope — very much like Chekhov's characters, in fact. That's how he constructed his characters."
Warchus employs his performers like paint brushes to get the big picture he wants. "They are great actors," he didn't hesitate to say. "The most crucial part of putting together The Norman Conquests was actually the casting process. It took a long time to find the right people. It's like a chemistry experiment — putting together different elements. When the casting was finalized, I knew the rehearsals would be great."
He claimed no pet performance with the results. "I've sympathy with all of the characters. I end up empathizing with everybody so I don't have much objectivity."
He pooh-poohed the notion that the three plays were "too British" for American audiences (as if the gales of giggling colonialists didn't already refute that enough).
"We changed nothing. We talked about cutting one line, but in the end we left it in." The line under fire? "Anyway, Hyde Park isn't country. It's just an underground car-park with grass roots." Explained the director: "We thought that was just vamping on information that would mean nothing to people, but we left it in anyway."
Ayckbourn, laid low by a stroke but writing again, attended the premiere of the plays' revival last year at The Old Vic. "Apparently," said Warchus, "he loved it. He told me he loved how seriously I'd taken it. That was a nice thing to hear."
The site picked for the after-party, Arena on West 41st, couldn't be more removed from the sedate English countryside of the plays — even one where Norman is running hilariously amok. You could get the bends coming down from that civilized high to this raucous, cramped little club — a point reiterated by the constant blare of musical noise that made conversation — and press interviews — an ordeal. This was the ambience in which the six-pack of Broadway debuters met the fourth estate.
Off stage, Miles is still saucer-eyed with what might be wonderment, but he checked his stupid at the door. Playing the slow-on-the-uptake country vet, who has yet to marry into this dysfunctional circus but is making fumbling headway in that direction with Annie, the actor clearly relished the work — and even the role.
"There are a lot of guys like that out there," Miles insisted. "Back in England when we did it, there was a whole league of people who would come backstage and say things like, 'I'm really glad there's somebody like that on stage.' It's as if they'd found a spokesperson. That was really bizarre. I guess I could start a Tom Fan Club."
Rehearsals for the show started in July of last year, so the company will have been together just over a year by the time the engagement ends at Circle in the Square.
"There are loads of favorite moments in this for me," admitted Miles, "but I think, probably in hindsight, that my most favorite moment will be when I was offered the job, when I said, 'Yeah,' because it has been such fun to do. It really has.
"There's so much to see in these plays. That's why it works for people who come back again and again to see — even the same show. People come back, having seen the others to get more from the original one that they saw. You got kinda groups of people who have their favorite shows. You get Garden people. You get Table people. You get Living Room people. It breeds a real sense of loyalty, these shows."
Tom is the only character in the play who gets away unkissed by Norman, but the actor who plays Norman, Mangan, insisted on partial credit: "Well, I do suck Tom's thumb," he offered as a qualifier, "so everyone gets a bit of Norman in these plays." Continued...
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