The Battle for The Norman Conquests
Suburban Beginnings
England’s most popular living playwright was born in Hampstead, a suburb of North London, on April 12, 1939. His father, Horace Ayckbourn, was the lead violinist for the London Symphony Orchestra. His mother, Irene Maud Worley, wrote for women’s magazines and published short stories and novels under the pseudonym “Mary James.” Her son called her “Lolly.”
“I spent a lot of my time in her company as a child and she would sit tapping away at her typewriter,” he said earlier this year in The Telegraph. “If she’d have been a baker, I would probably have started rolling out pastries.”
For the record, Lolly and Horace were never married. When she left him shortly after World War II, she filed for divorce from her first husband in order to marry a rural bank manager named Cecil Pye in 1946. Alan’s new family included a stepbrother, Christopher, and “home” was now in rural Sussex. The Pye clan lived variously in Billingshurst, Wisborough, Horsham, Uckfield, Hayward’s Heath and Lewes. The marriage of Lolly and Cecil, bumpy from the start, only got rockier.
“I was surrounded by relationships that weren’t altogether stable,” Alan later told The New York Times. “The air was often blue, and things were sometimes flying across the kitchen table.”
A boarding school boy, Alan wrote his first play at Wisborough Lodge prep school when he was 10. At 12, he earned a scholarship to attend Haileybury, one of England’s leading co-ed schools that counts Rudyard Kipling and Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan among its alumni. He toured the Netherlands in a school production of Romeo and Juliet, and in 1956, toured the U.S. and Canada in Macbeth.
At 17, convinced it was time to pursue a career in theater, Ayckbourn left Haileybury early and immediately got a three-week job with the company of soon-to-be-knighted thespian Donald Wolfit. In 1957, he became an actor/stage manager at the Library Theatre in Scarborough, the U.K.’s first professional theater in the round. Artistic director Stephen Joseph challenged the young actor to write and direct, and Ayckbourn’s debut play, The Square Cat, opened in the spring of 1959. The theater-in-the-round setup would become an integral element in Ayckbourn’s work, and to this day, Scarborough remains home.
“I remember I got off the train packed with holidaymakers and this bracing air and smell of chips,” he later wrote in The Times of London. “Because I was an inland child living in north Sussex, one of the great treats as a child was a trip to the seaside— so, dear reader, I bought the sweet shop. I came to the seaside and stayed. I thought, ‘This can’t get better.’”
Mr. A’s Amazing Maze Plays
From here on, the ultra-prolific career of Alan Ayckbourn becomes difficult to encapsulate. Capping off his acting career in 1964, he became an acclaimed director Arthur Miller proclaimed his staging of A View from the Bridge as definitive, served as artistic director for a number of English theaters including the National, collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber 1975’s Jeeves, produced radio drama for the BBC, taught at Oxford as the Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre and earned his own knighthood in 1997 for his services to the theater.
Then there’s his written work: At present, Ayckbourn has completed 72 full-length plays, plus more than 20 revues and plays for children. The Telegraph went so far as to anoint him “the most successful-in-his-lifetime playwright there has ever been, including Shakespeare.” Neil Simon, the American playwright most frequently compared with Ayckbourn, might disagree with that assessment. His many hits include Absurd Person Singular, Bedroom Farce, Absent Friends, Woman in Mind and, of course, The Norman Conquests.
Built like an epic yet defined as a farce, The Norman Conquests consists of three separate, unified yet independent plays: Living Together, Table Manners and Round and Round the Garden. Each involves six friends and one very complicated weekend in a country house, and each tells the same story within the same time frame, yet from a different area of the house dining room, living room, garden. An exit in one play is an entrance in another, as the conceit goes, and while Ayckbourn designed the trilogy so that each play can be enjoyed individually and in any order, his cleverness is irrefutable when it’s viewed as a whole. Watching all the pieces connect feels like solving a Rubik’s Cube—if solving a Rubik’s Cube made one laugh out loud for nine hours.
In typical Ayckbourn fashion, the synopsis for The Norman Conquests doesn’t look like much on paper. Here’s how the playwright summarizes Living Together on his website: “The events of one weekend as seen from the Sitting Room. In which Reg is driven mad by Tom... Tom tells Annie a thing or two... Annie nearly comes to blows with Sarah... Sarah sees a different side of Norman... Norman sorts things out with Ruth... Ruth discovers the charms of a fireside rug... and in which nobody enjoys playing board games.”
If that makes your average episode of Seinfeld seem like a plot-driven mystery, allow us to elaborate: Norman is a not-very-quiet assistant librarian who’s plagued by bad luck and worse judgment. After failing to seduce his sister-in-law, he heals his wounds by making a play at his other sister-in-law. As hijinks ensue and the audience feels relief this isn’t their country house, Ayckbourn sneaks in many moments that are less ha-ha funny and more about hard truths.
“When I started out, there were serious plays where the lighting was desperately dark and the tempo turgid, and comic plays where madness prevailed and everyone talked like Dick Van Dyke on speed.” Ayckbourn told The Guardian in 1992. “What I’ve tried to do is bring these elements together, which is a bit like dancing on the edge of a razor blade.”
Man of the Moment
Written in 1973, The Norman Conquests debuted on London’s West End the following year and became an enormous hit. On December 7, 1975, it opened on Broadway at the since-destroyed Morosco Theatre in a production starring Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, Estelle Parsons and Ken Howard. The trilogy played through June, receiving a warm review from New York Times critic Walter Kerr but no Tony Award nominations. In 1977, the plays were turned into a miniseries starring Tom Conti, nominated for an Emmy for Ayckbourn’s script.
And what of Ayckbourn’s reputation? Hugely famous in England but not so well known here, the playwright has been looked at in some quarters as the Stephen King of the theater: a commercially successful writer who specializes in a genre comedy that pundits love to snub. In 1999, The Independent reported that Ayckbourn’s work had inspired only two American and one English doctoral theses, and that the writer of the English thesis was told by his professor, “If only Ayckbourn were dead, it would be easier to rate him.” As the playwright himself has cracked, “Most young writers would say they were influenced by Scrobadov, a rare Polish playwright who wrote one play and drowned himself, rather than an Establishment figure like me.”
An additional challenge: Ayckbourn designed his scripts to be performed at Scarborough’s in-the-round theater, and most playhouses around the world feature the more traditional proscenium-arch setup. So while his hit comedies earned a spot in the pantheon of perpetually revived plays, Ayckbourn kept a tight hold on The Norman Conquests, absent from both the West End and Broadway for more than three decades.
“He actually had withdrawn rights to most of his plays over the last five to ten years,” says Matthew Warchus, director of such Ayckbourn-esque comedies as Boeing-Boeing and God of Carnage. “He’s a very, very good director himself, so I think it’s complicated for him to see his plays taken in a slightly different way.”
What Goes Around Comes Around
One of the fans of the original Broadway production of The Norman Conquests was none of than two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey. “I was 13 years old and a young drama student and fell in love with them as plays,” he says. Once he was appointed artistic director at the Old Vic, the legendary theater co-founded by Laurence Olivier, Spacey placed Ayckbourn’s trilogy at the top of his wish list, with Warchus as director. To get the playwright’s approval, he pledged a costly renovation of the historic theater.
“We were aiming to make people who’d been to the Old Vic feel like they’d never been there before, that they couldn’t believe what we’d done,” says Spacey—as if producing three plays in repertory, which required the highest level of commitment not only from actors but from the audience, too, wasn’t stress-inducing enough. “I have enormous faith in Matthew and enormous love and affection for the plays,” says Spacey. “But if it had not gone well, can you imagine? We had completely reconfigured the theater and it didn’t work!?!”
It did, obviously. Critics rhapsodized over the theater’s makeover and fawned over the play. Audiences turned it into a commercial blockbuster. And Ayckbourn, who suffered a stroke in 2006 but quickly returned to work at his beloved theater in Scarborough, received a special Olivier Award from Spacey for lifetime achievement in early March.
A Broadway transfer of the entire production wasn’t so complicated, since Circle in the Square could provide the in-the-round experience. “There’s something so daring and dangerous about actors having nowhere to hide and characters therefore having nowhere to hide,” says Spacey. “There’s this kind of exposure.” Adds Warchus, “It immediately removes the trap of middle-class, middle-of-the-road theater. The wallpaper, the French windows, all the things that make a play look more conventional. Take those away, and you just have an island of clarity and agony.”
Warchus doesn’t just call The Norman Conquests a highlight of his already-impressive career, but the highlight. “I realize it’s is a strange thing to do, to ask people to see three plays with the same characters in the same setting,” he says. “But there’s a promise in return. The people who do see these plays will remember them for the rest of their lives.” See for yourself now that Norman’s back in New York!